“The broom has become this really handy tool for me to work around the gendered connotations that you might get from painting the naked female figure. The broom is nude but you don’t really think about it. And this enables me to place her in all sorts of scenarios.”
— Emily Mae Smith
Tangled in symbolism, wry and whimsical characterise the meticulous paintings by Emily Mae Smith, a Texas-born, Brooklyn-based artist who has earned significant international praise over the past two decades that only continues to grow. Looking to Pop culture, Surrealism, and revisionist historiography, Smith devours and reformulates a wide variety of references to create her unique, intricate fantasy worlds within which her iconic Broomstick character resides. Its image nods to that of the artist’s paintbrush and as a symbol of women-oriented domestic labour, with inspiration specifically taken from the dancing broomsticks in Disney’s Fantasia whom Smith aims to liberate ‘from the film’s menial labour and reproduction role’i.
Employed in her work as a tongue-in-cheek way to draw attention to the prevalent objectification of the female form throughout the history of art, Smith explores the motif of the broomstick to engage with the themes of feminism, gender-related complexities, and representation. Forcibly stepping into a tradition of painting that has relegated women to the sidelines for centuries, Smith is widely celebrated for her imaginative visual universe, as exquisitely encapsulated in Broom Life, whereby pervasive parameters are dismantled through wit and humour to reveal her subject matter’s deeper ramifications.
Broom Life immediately strikes us with its vivid use of colours, rendered in icy blue hues that melt and pool at the bottom of the canvas, under the radiant warmth of the clementine sherbet sunset. At the centre of the composition, an effeminate, anthropomorphic broomstick sits on top of a large block of ice, illustrated in a bleached blonde wig with circular mod girl sunglasses, lush red lips, and lounging with a cocktail drink in hand, evoking the joy and relaxation of a holiday in the sun.

The protagonist of the painting draws an instant comparison to the subject of Dust (2019), a canvas created by Smith five years later that sold on 3 December 2020 at Phillips Hong Kong in Association with Poly Auction, far surpassing its pre-sale estimates. In both works the broomstick subject is depicted seated at the centre of the work, however, in Dust, their figure is cast in a silhouette shadow, turned away from the viewer as if our presence is unknown. Similarly, in Alien Shores (2018), Smith’s current auction record work which Phillips London achieved in 2020, the broom gazes out at a Surrealist sunset with their back also turned. Contrasting both Dust and Alien Shores, in the present painting, the subject exudes confidence and charisma, looking directly at the viewer as she confronts us from behind her white, circular frames, enticing us to join with her drink raised out as if toasting a ‘cheers’.
With Broom Life, Smith follows a long tradition of representing the female nude in the history of art, engaging with the provocative parameters of traditional portraiture in a light-hearted, witty manner, challenging the historical notions of fetishisation and the voyeuristic male gaze. From the early portrayals by the Old Masters, of coy deities who are cloaked in mythology with an impeccable beauty, the representation of the female form has slowly transformed over the centuries as more artists have challenged the expectations of eroticism in association with the nude. Indeed, the image of the passive female sitter has since been interrogated by artists from Manet to contemporary feminist icons including Cindy Sherman and the Guerilla Girls, who critique in their art power constructs, reclaiming sovereignty over the representation of women.