Baltimore-based, South African artist Jo Smail (b. 1943, Durban), is celebrated world-wide for her abstract paintings, drawings, collages, and prints frequently composed through multiple states of material accruals, subtractions, and modifications.

Educated in South Africa, Smail moved to Baltimore in 1985 and taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art from 1988 - 2017 – now she is a Emeritus Professor of Fine Art. Formal exploration as well as invention derives from the artist’s personal history, delving into the past and the present with equal weight. Influenced by South African Apartheid, a devastating Baltimore studio fire (1995), a life-altering stroke (2000), the socio-political content of personal effects, the natural world, and art history.

Smail’s work has been the subject of myriad exhibitions and major publications with reviews printed in The New York Times, Art in America, The Hudson Review, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post, Brooklyn Rail, Art Forum, among many others. She has been the recipient of numerous accolades and residencies, including the Trawick Sapphire prize, Maryland State Arts Council Awards, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Rochefort-en-Terre Residency in France, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and nomination for "Anonymous was a Woman."

Smail is represented in private and public collections internationally including : Baltimore Museum of Art US Embassy, Johannesburg Chase Manhattan Bank, Johannesburg & New York locations Durban Museum and Art Gallery, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg Art Museum, Johns Hopkins University Collection, Mobil Corporation Art Collection, Fidelity Collection, National Gallery of South Africa, Pretoria Art Museum and many others.

Represented in the USA by Goya Contemporary Gallery, Smail has collaborated with fellow South African artist William Kentridge. In 2020, the artist had her first major one-woman retrospective exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art.