• Shirley Smith was raised in Whitewater, KS, a small community thirty miles northeast of Wichita.

• She attended Kansas State University and majored in radio communications.

• She moved to New York City in 1952 at twenty-three, where she joined a growing art community in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. She lived in an industrial building that was an abandoned doll factory, which she renovated herself.

• Smith had successful careers as a theatre actor and model, and then became a painter after suffering hearing loss.

• Starting in 1982, the artist returned to Kansas every summer and created works depicting farm animals. She lived in a trailer on land owned by a relative.