The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
2025 Ohio Artist Registry Juried Exhibition
Star Smart
Visual Artist SelfSelfCincinnati Ohio 45220 United StateshomeHome Ohio United Stateshome Home Phone: 8599923049home Website: Website Website: Artsy Website: VirualSPAR
Bio
Star Smart is an award-winning contemporary abstract artist, activist, writer, political and artistic spokesperson, and most recently a creative voice for the cancer experience.
She received her degree in Fine Art and continues to study related to her field at universities such as MIT, Harvard, and Duke Universities. Star states, “If I want to create new art practices, new art, I must always be learning.
Smart has just relocated from Miami, Florida to Cincinnati, Ohio. She is eager is to begin work in her beautiful, studio space in an historic building that’s over 100 years old. She took her move seriously. After her battle with a rare cancer and a personal crisis she wanted to slow down. To see things she hadn’t seen in years; hills, historic architecture, and materials not used in South Florida like stone and brick. “It may sound strange to some but being so tactile I missed those textures. Star smiles. She further comments, “I am inspired to work anywhere I feel fuel to create. However, gazing on the space that will be my studio where I can create pieces in a bigger scale excites me. The best is yet to come.”
Star’s work extends across many mediums however, she has a fondness for recycled, fiber-like mediums(recycled plastic) and homemade paper. She often creates new processes to complete the vision of her pieces.
Her art has been in many interesting and prestigious exhibitions; including Miami Art Week, Yoko Ono’s Arising at The Nobel Peace Center, and The Florence Biennale. This year she will be a freshman artist at Art Basel in Switzerland.
Smart prefers to work immersed in music to keep the purity of her vision, she is meticulous when it comes to sensory engagement. She will often limit sight, sound, even diet, while engaging her pieces. Most of her pieces are drawn from her experiences from a very storied life.
In her recent PHARMA Series, a departure in medium, she drew from her battle with a rare cancer. Not content to spend it medically altered to waste away she took to the only thing in her reach. The cell phone for music and manipulation and the many medications she was expected to consume. She dumped them out in frustration and boredom. Where there was misery Star saw beauty. She collaged them and created “Symptoms” and “Phlowers.” Smart celebrated each tiny victory as she needed less medication. “I decided that I would crush one up each time the doctor said I could discontinue use,” she recalls.I called those “Victorious.” She was fascinated by their shapes. Inspired again to create she manipulated what she saw and captured it.
Her art practice draws on the ideas of abstraction, minimalism, Dadaism, the concept of ikigai, anti-consumerism, and a dedication to legacy.
Artist Statement
Many people wonder why I don’t paint, draw, sculpt. That’s what I did to obtain a degree in fine art. I have always had a passion to create and have always been given the freedom to create. I can paint, draw, sculpt, sew, collage, digitally create, and mixed media(and do at times).
However, I wanted something of my own. As I did all of those other things bits of what would become my own started to form and I started to experiment with my chosen media, recycled plastic “textile.” Sculpting with my hands and then with fire is hot and it’s hard on the back, on the hands, on the knees, and on the feet.
Sculpting each and every component whether it be tiny one for a piece or a very large one as a single piece of art it’s tiring. Especially since the cancer. But it’s what I want to do. It’s what I craved when I was too weak to get out of bed, too weak to walk, too weak to stand.
I love fire, I crave fire, I always have. As a child I set the sofa in my parents living room on fire just to see what would happen. I would play with lighters, matches, sticks with glowing hot ends that had just been pulled from the fire, when I was a kid. It draws me in. I love the chaos of it. It can be small, it can be big it can be many shapes. When I’m practicing my art if I’m not patient the piece I’m working on can simply burn away. It takes hours sometimes months of patience, back cramping, and finger cramping to master the form of art that I envisioned, that I call my own.
I am impatient by nature but the process cannot be hurried. If I lose patience and let the flame burn too high or too hot what I’m creating burns away and I’m left with nothing. With patience I set my blow torch and prepare for the mask that makes it difficult to breathe, the sweat that is going to pour from my brow, and the aches that my body will experience. A body that has itself suffered and been burned by radiation, all to make something that I consider unique and beautiful. Something to help me unpack my trauma and my fears or something that I am simply inspired to do. An offering to the world that I consider beautiful and/or interesting.
I’m still amazed that I have made thousands of these fire sculpted pieces with my hands, sculpting and wielding the fire, coaxing them to the shape of this or that curve. Those viewing my art for the first time will comment that it looks to have been difficult and those that know me know it’s difficult.
I often take the most difficult path for one reason or another I want to go somewhere no one has gone and I want to master something no one has mastered and bend it to my will and call it my own, they are my fingerprints, they are my legacy for my daughter. I am the creator and the destroyer.