by Alex Wells and Ana Milosevic
Zak Smith’s recent retrospective monograph Drown In It along with his work’s appearance (like an island of legibility and painterly ass worship in a sea of postmodern prose and penis) in The Box’s recent encyclopedic group show Phallus :: Fascinum :: Fascism suggest an almost 19th Century figure. Here is an eccentric painter complete with chaotic love life (see the memoir We Did Porn, 2009), who illustrates classic literature (Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, 2004), with sweeping theories of art and its role in society (Degenerate Art Notebook, 2025, on view at The Box) coming on like some puffy-shirted opium addict whose name keeps popping up in the end notes to other peoples’ Collected Letters. Most anachronistically of all, he actually paints actual subjects in their actual homes, from fellow artists and intellectuals to sex workers, dancing girls and waifs off the street (though no actual French girls, as far as I can tell) in a way that suggests the paintings actually require the models and which implies that individual people and homes are interesting, regardless of their ability to represent anything larger than themselves.
We decided to interview some of the women in the Girls In The Naked Girl Business series and other portraits, to see the work through the eyes of the women who fuel it:
Zak Smith, Girls In the Naked Girl Business: Charlie, 2004. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art and the artist.
Artist Beatrice Schleyer (whose eerily undulating brass-and-lead sculpture concentric cartridge (2025) also appears in The Box’s mega-show) has known Smith since she was a Suicide Girl in the early 2000’s. He contacted her through the site (the owners were fans, of course):
I kind of assumed he’d be some shitty two-bit painter—the type of cornball who does mediocre erotic nude photography and wants to be taken seriously as an artist. I was doubly shocked when I looked him up; not only was he a really good artist, but a self portrait identified him as the boyfriend of my crush. I knew her from the clubs and her job at the B&N in Union Square, and had seen them together once in the subway. My hopes that he was some half-rate schlub were shattered!
The portrait of Schleyer, carrying her former nomme–de–déshabillage Charlie Suicide, was snatched up by the MOMA before it was even shown when it was taken from the museum to the gallery for Smith’s solo show, Schleyer remembers “it was transported in a velvet crate and watched by an armed guard at the opening.” She also remembers being struck how Smith handled it all:
He was very unequivocal about how he spoke to someone with power and a random person on the street; he didn’t change his tone at all while sitting at the dinner with the museum board. As a young artist I was super impressed by that (and still am). It was hard to imagine being able to resist the urge to put on airs for people who could help me so much.
Zak Smith, Girls In the Naked Girl Business: SAWA, 2005. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the artist.
Smith’s portrait of fellow Suicide Girls alum Sarah Remetch (known as Sawa when naked or singing grindcore) ended up in New York’s Whitney Museum. Thinking back to the day he first came over to paint her, a few days after a birthday party, she recalls “I think what we first bonded over that day was doom metal.” A larger-than-life print of the painting, in the form of a shower curtain, still confronts anyone who enters Remetch’s bathroom. “There is a certain essence,” she says “that Zak captures that is very authentic to whoever he is painting.”
Like a few of the Suicide Girls themselves, Smith eventually moved from mere nudes to hardcore pornography—both in his subject matter and in his actual life, where he appeared as male talent in several adult films. He had soon worked with an internet-favorite porn stars like Stoya and Sasha Grey in both capacities—the latter portrait was acquired by the Saatchi Collection.
Zak Smith, This Is The Hour, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.
He first met adult film actress Charlotte Stokely when their movies were both shown together at a porn film festival in Berlin. She appears in several of his paintings, including a portrait she commissioned and This Is The Hour (2015) a stark and grotesque image inspired by Gustav Klimt’s pair of Judith paintings and vintage horror-movie posters. It would appear Stokely feels more than fine about being reduced to a white, blonde severed head beneath Smith’s triumphantly nude black former girlfriend Michelle Ford, Stokely had it printed on the side of a coffee mug she drinks coffee out of all the time.
As for the process, like everyone else I spoke to, Stokely describes it as one of the less taxing modeling jobs “He likes a strong light to one side to capture angles of the face and body. Takes some photos with his camera and that’s pretty much it.”
Zak Smith, Degenerate Art Notebook (detail), 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Misty Star met Smith the old-fashioned way: an Instagram DM. She started following him because “I got introduced to his art through an ex of mine who told me I reminded him of his models…I got a DM request from Zak, asking me if he could paint me, I guess my ex was more correct than he realized at the time.” The result featured a field of blue speckles emerging from a corner and crawling across Star’s bed, Zelda-postered walls, Velma-like specs and, especially, her ass. “I think nakedness in art is something that seems like I’m supposed to have an opinion or feelings about, but I really don’t…I felt like the blue light was reminiscent of an image fading away from an older television, like when you turn it off after it has been on for a long time, and it still has that fuzzy glow emanating from it.”
Was she comfortable being represented mostly by her butt? “I felt comfortable showing that part of myself because I believed Zak would do it justice and with great reverence…I guess it would be like the average person becoming friends with like Taylor Swift or something or having her write a song about them?”
The other Smith subjects I spoke to expressed similar sentiments, though there has been dissent. In 2019, Smith’s estranged wife Amanda Nagy (porn name: Mandy Morbid) diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, emerged two years after their separation with a variety of allegations against Smith all of which were aggressively shared by her fans online.
Smith sued successfully over these claims five times in five different defamation suits across the world (including in Canada where Nagy now resides, Los Angeles, New Zealand, Australia and Switzerland) against Nagy and those who repeated the accusations. Many of his models testified on his behalf.
Zak Smith, Degenerate Art Notebook (detail), 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Not all the women Smith works with are Girls In the Naked Girl Business, though many are sex–work–adjacent, including makeup artists, hairdressers and other denizens of LA’s sprawling beauty industry. “I’m vain, I like to look hot and be rendered as such,” says hairdresser Alexus Anderson frankly, “Zak is very good at that.” But alongside the flattery she also admires the visual complexity: “It just looks like when you walk into your friends apartment and they didn’t expect company. I see so many pictures and paintings [by other artists] and everything is so neat. I like a shop where you don’t even know what’s for sale and what’s decorative. For myself it’s just so much more exciting to look at, like an I-Spy book.”
Anderson has been painted in a variety of ways including (in the Degenerate Art Notebook) painted as a clown and offering her breasts to her then-girlfriend plus–sized porn actress Quinn Rain, who is herself dressed as the lovesick monochrome clown Pierrot. As with the Notebook’s studies of Wonder Woman’s backside, spangled with stars and referencing Marsden Hartley, the image layers frank contemporary sexuality with images from a decadently Modernist past haunted by the political forces that would soon attempt to destroy it (Pierrots and other clowns were favorite subjects of doomy German Expressionist like Otto Dix and Arnold Schoenberg). As if to underscore the point, Smith didn’t have to set any of this up to take the reference photos. Anderson and Rain were making out dressed as clowns anyway and Smith just took out his camera phone. For Anderson being part of the art is just part of life “I enjoy seeing the process,” she says ”watching him set up a space to his liking and then placing you in his universe—it’s messy, and alive, and real.”
Featured image: Zak Smith, Girls in the Naked Girl Business: Brante (with Tyrone the Ostrich), 2023. Courtesy of the artist.