Allison Smith has exhibited her work nationally and internationally since 1995. She has produced over 25 solo exhibitions, installations, performances, and artist-led participatory projects for venues such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Public Art Fund, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Arts Club of Chicago, and S!GNAL Center for Contempoary Art, among many others.

She has exhibited her work in group exhibitions at galleries and museum including P.S.1/MoMA, Palais de Tokyo, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, MASS MoCA, and The Tang Museum. Smith has lectured on her work extensively at art schools and research universities in the United States and abroad, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SculptureCenter and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

Her work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, on NPR, KQED, Art:21, PBS The Art Assignment, and in many other media and scholarly publications. Smith has received generous support from United States Artists, Arts Council England, FOR-SITE Foundation, Creative Work Fund, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Artadia, the National Endowment for the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts. Notable residencies include IASPIS (Stockholm, Sweden), The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts), the Museum of Modern Art Artists Experiment initiative (New York, New York), the International Studio and Curatorial Program (Brooklyn, New York), Artpace San Antonio (Texas), and Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, California). Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Saatchi Gallery London, Linda Pace Foundation, and many other public and private collections worldwide. Smith is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco.