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Margaret Smithers-Crump is a Canadian artist based in Houston, Texas. Her work addresses the vulnerability and interconnectedness of Earth’s diverse life forms and ecosystems as impacted by global warming, pollution and loss of habitat. Fittingly, she creates her spatial artworks with recycled plexiglas, a material that evokes fragility and human consumption.

Smithers-Crump has exhibited nationally with recent solo exhibitions at the Grace Museum, Abilene; Pearl Fincher MFA, Houston; Galveston Art Center; Imperial Center for the Arts, Rocky Mount, NC; Penn College of Technology - Penn State and Manifest Art Gallery, Cincinnati. Her upcoming solo exhibitions include Rudolph Blume Fine Art / Art Scan Gallery in conjunction with the 2019 Sculpture Month Houston and the Art Museum of South East Texas, Beaumont in 2020.

She received her BFA in Painting from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio in 1973. Smithers-Crump grew up on her family’s island in Canada and lived in the south Pacific in her early twenties. This early experience nurtured her respect and awe for nature. She maintains that the planet is her best educator.

The book mentioned in the interview is Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Vital Signs, Gallery view, exhibited at the Galveston Art Center, Galveston, Texas, 2016. This image features “In Silence” in the foreground and “Code Blue” on the back gallery wall. Art materials are recycled plexiglas, paint, and wood.

Detail from A Question of Balance, incorporating 135 hand cut and fabricated recycled plexiglas dodecahedrons with a circular reverse painted plexiglas support, anthracite and black sand. 72” x 72” x 15”, 2016 - 2018