In My Song to Sing, Shinique Smith (b. Baltimore, Maryland, 1971) creates a joyous pinwheel of work that seems to celebrate the affirmative power of music and its ability to bring forth powerful visual art. Smith says that she begins each of her works with words of affirmation. Often, these affirmations will be bits of popular song lyrics or the poetry of Walt Whitman, which become inscribed with her brushstrokes. Her colorful materials in My Song to Sing are the past exhibition postcards and announcements from all of her former solo exhibitions up to the date of creation of this new work, as well as printed fabrics with details of her paintings and sculptures. Thus, the artist’s past becomes present, and a reminder that nothing is ever wasted in a creative endeavor.
Smith’s title is inspired by Whitman's Song of Myself and its famous first line "I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” Although a formal abstraction, Smith’s work functions as both a self-portrait of the artist and as a reflection of her art career at a turning point. Smith takes her history and transforms it into the perfection of the Fibonacci spiral, the geometric form whose growth follows the golden ratio, getting wider for every quarter turn it makes. The inherent joyfulness of this spiral found in Smith’s created work is recognizable in nature. It is the pattern of the sunflower, and the artist regards this geometry as a reference to the transformation of the divine within.