Peggy Jane Smith was born in Meridian, Mississippi in 1932, and died there in January 2023. As a young woman in the 1960’s she went to New York City to study painting at Hunter College, where her teacher, Robert Motherwell, spoke of her as one of his best students. She and her close friend Jim Rosenquist hung out together, exploring New York, especially Harlem and the world of jazz. During that early period the Stable Gallery, in that day the primary venue in which careers were established, offered her a show, but on a condition: They required her to change her name to “Meridian,” a la Robert “Indiana.” Though it would indeed have confirmed and advanced her career, this substitution of geographical for personal identity seemed to her only worthy of refusal. Later she moved out of N.Y. and moved to Hoboken, N.J. where she joined a small group of like-minded abstract artists and continued to work in her apartment studio while earning her living teaching as an adjunct in art departments and at the Hoboken high school. In the 1980’s  she returned to Meridian. She made large oils and small works on paper, using casein, watercolors and gouache as well as pastels. Her deeply playful works exploring the intersections of intention and the random are informed by Abstract Expressionism and by artists foundational to her spirit, Gorky, Miro and Kandinsky.