About Carrie
Carrie Smith Libman is an artist living and working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. With a background in sculpture, she uses metaphor, found objects, pattern, collage, and assemblage as building materials to talk about nostalgia, presence, connection, and growth. Since becoming a mother, her work has become a direct and indirect collaboration with her three young children. Blending fine art materials with craft supplies and the domestic artifacts of their daily life, she works in short, colorful bursts of time from her basement studio, an imperfect patchwork of moments and memories.
She received her BFA in Sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Florida where she also taught Sculpture and Drawing. Her work is included in private collections across the US, and she is an active member of Pittsburgh’s art community through Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, Society of Sculptors, and Flock Artists Collective, a group of Artist/Mothers dedicated to showing work in the region. As a compliment to her studio practice, Carrie works in healthcare strategy. She finds endless inspiration in the intersections and overlaps of her creative practice, corporate America, and motherhood.
About the work
My current work is a love letter to childhood. I document my young children' s growth alongside my own rebirth through a visual vocabulary of collaged gardens, grids, and domestic artifacts realized in free standing assemblage sculptures and wall mounted mixed media works. Each piece is a vibrant balance of chaos and control. What a joy it is to watch our children grow. What a privilege it is to bear witness to such imagination and innocence.
What would this world look like if we never lost our own sense of wonder?
My work is a place, a portal, and a mother’s hope.
What kind of world are we leaving them?
What kind of world could we leave them?
I work in collections and series and think about each body as an exhibition, either realized or waiting to happen. Below is capture of my recent work.
Meadow (2025)
In the soft of the meadow time stands still. The grass is long and soft and the wildflowers plentiful. The meadow is a place, a portal, and a hope all at once.
What kind of world (2024)
Since becoming a mother, my work has become an indirect collaboration with children. I work alongside them, on our own creations, sharing our materials. I come back after bedtime while my house sleeps, adding layers to each piece. Collage, assemblage, and readymade materials lend themselves to quick decision making and feel appropriate in this season of short, colorful studio bursts. Through these materials I speak to the many contradictions of parenthood - chaos, spontaneity, controlled grids and structured spacing. Delicate florals evoke possibility and pause. A flower in every form. Bold color strikes confidence while thin paper edges, artificial grass, and windows frames feel vulnerable, distanced. Each piece speaks to both childhoods long gone and the ones currently unfolding. What kind of world are we leaving them? What kind of world are we creating for them?
Seedlings (2023)
From the first small kick of my ribs, I have been hyperaware of my role as a mother. Be the environment. Be the soil, the soft landing, the sun and the rain, the armor and the reflection. Hold lightly your hopes and dreams for your children. Cultivate, like a gardener, the environment for them to chase and realize their own. In the work, household artifacts are woven, tied, and knotted together. Drawings, wrapping paper, grocery lists, and to dos are roughly collaged and worked back into with crayons, paint, and pencil, active mark marking. Out of the collaged masses sprout seedlings, new and undefined. Confident, eager, and fragile all the same. The fledgling, unfinished leaves are as much myself as they are my children, as they are any of us, delicate and full of potential.
Houseplants (2022)
Houseplants is an exploration of motherhood. The work is a collaboration with my daughter. We paint together in my studio, pure creativity and experimentation. The panels are wild and free, just like her. At night, when she and her brothers are asleep, I carefully cut out images of houseplants while I watch them on the monitor. I match these curated plants to a companion panel and offset them with my own intentional mark making, an act of balancing spontaneity with the right amount of structure and care. The pieces become a call and response. They are about motherhood and childhood, holding tight and letting go, navigating when to lead and when to follow, and a point in time artifact capturing these early years.
Gardeners (2021)
Gardeners is about both looking back and looking forward, about motherhood and parenting, yes, but more about the new relationships we form with ourselves as we become parents. Throughout the work floral subject and patterned or painted background vie for attention. Symmetry is ever present, but always slightly off, never perfect, a balance between the organic and the structured, a metaphor for well laid plans and reality. There is a focus on the new and fresh floral centerpiece but always present competition from an active background, who you were and who you are becoming, that two things can be true at the same time and that the only constant is growth.