La Jolla , Calif.Alexis Smith is not quite a feminist artist, not quite a conceptualist, not quite an installation artist, not always an ironist, and in the beginning she wasn’t even Alexis Smith. In her art, however, Ms. Smith is at times all of those things. Collage—intimate and mural-sized—is her metier, and her sensibility is more literary than plastic. One could easily get the idea from the 50 works on view in “Alexis Smith: The American Way” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla that the artist has read most of the Great Books of the Western World and seen almost every movie and stage musical ever made. This is slyly accomplished by—to describe a typical Smith collage—a small pictorial souvenir from popular culture coupled with a few typewritten words from, for example, a Raymond Chandler L.A. detective novel.

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