When you step inside Waller Gallery, their current exhibit, Transit, initially appears to be a group show. There are color photos on the wall, large concrete letters proliferating across the ground, items of clothing, embroidered badges, and a giant continuous ream of paper hanging from the ceiling covered in text. Along the hallway, there are what appear to be receipts printed large but on rice paper and hung like linen tapestries, with ink brush calligraphy painting flowing words on each one. And then, in the back gallery, there is a series of small red paintings on Kotex pads, more video, more garments, a series of tiny, framed text-basd film stills, two giant framed silhouettes, and a selfie mirror, with rope, an enamel American flag pin, and a mic stand.
The common denominator in all of these pieces is an emphasis on printed text and language, but underlying that is the concept of ‘Transit,’ denoting bodies in motion, migration, and transition between places, cultures, and identities.
The person who created all of the works in the gallery is Baltimore-based conceptual artist Julia Kim Smith. In the list of works provided by the gallery, she explains that the title references Anna Seghers’ fictional novel, Transit, based on Seghers’ experiences as a German refugee in the 1930s. The idea of transit and transition, is not a new concept for the artist.
We sat down for a 30 minute interview, to learn more about the exhibit and the context surrounding it, on Friday, February 20, a day ahead of the closing reception at Waller.
If interested, consider attending the Feb 21 closing reception at Waller Gallery, complete with KARAOKE!!!
Transit | Julia Kim Smith
January 16, 2026 – February 21, 2026
Closing Reception: Saturday, February 21: 7-9 PM
Julia Kim Smith’s Transit arrives at a moment when the language of displacement has become uncomfortably familiar. Smith, the daughter of Korean refugees who immigrated to the United States after the Korean War, assembles fifteen years of work spanning video, text, embroidery, and blood into a reckoning that refuses the comfort of metaphor. These pieces insist on the material reality of bodies that carry history, bodies that get reduced to caricature on restaurant receipts, bodies that must perform citizenship as proof of belonging.
The exhibition opens with Cathy Park Hong’s words rendered in concrete: “NEXT IN LINE TO BE WHITE/NEXT IN LINE TO DISAPPEAR.” Cast concrete letters spell out a meditation on Asian American invisibility, on the particular violence of being told you’re a model minority one moment and asked “where are you really from?” the next. Elsewhere, Smith turns documentation into an artifact. The Receipts series presents restaurant bills where servers casually deployed racial slurs, printed on rice paper and hung like scrolls. They occupy the space between evidence and elegy, the paper trail of casual racism folded into everyday transactions. Using menstrual blood on Kotex pads in The Daily Pad series, Smith creates icons of Jesus, Damien Hirst paintings, and Donald Trump’s hair, collapsing the sacred and profane while reminding us that women’s labor, particularly women of color’s labor, gets rendered invisible even as it’s everywhere. Selfie Mirror, with its etched surface and American flag pin, turns self-documentation into something more complicated, offering no clean reflection, only the trace of looking, the evidence of trying to locate yourself in a nation that treats you as a perpetual foreigner.
Julia Kim Smith is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been featured by Angry Asian Man, Animal, Art F City, artnet News, Baltimore Magazine, BmoreArt, GQ, Hypebeast, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz, kottke.org, Ms., Paper Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and international media outlets. Her films have received premieres at Slamdance Film Festival, Cinequest Film Festival, Center For Asian American Media CAAMFest, San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival, and Joe’s Pub. Smith has exhibited nationally and internationally with new media and feminist artists Renee Cox, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Kate Durbin, Hasan Elahi, Coco Fusco, Poppy Jackson, Rupi Kaur, Sarah Maple, Haley Morris-Cafiero, Phranc, Joyce J. Scott, Annie Sprinkle, Diane Torr, Sue Williams, Martha Wilson, and Barbara Zucker.
Smith is a former A.I.R. Gallery artist, Rubys Artist Grant recipient, Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award recipient, two-time Creative Capital semi-finalist, and three-time Sondheim Prize semi-finalist. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Visual Communication from The University of Michigan where she was the recipient of a Rackham Fellowship. She worked as senior designer at the PBS and NPR affiliate WETA, Washington, DC, and has led design workshops at Maryland Institute College of Art. Her 3-D greeting card line SLANT was honored with the LOUIE Award and has been featured nationally at arango, Art Institute of Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, Kate’s Paperie, National Building Museum, Saks Fifth Avenue, The Store Ltd, Urban Outfitters, and Whitney Museum of American Art Store Next Door. She is a Creative Alliance trustee emeritus.
Smith lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her family and the world’s most irritating dog, cat, and bird.
