Clarice Smith was born in Washington, DC. She attended the University of Maryland and received a BA and MFA from George Washington University, where she was also a member of the Art Department faculty from 1980-1987. She was a successful professional artist for over 60 years with numerous solo exhibitions in prestigious galleries in the United States and abroad, including London, Paris, Zurich, Maastricht, and Jerusalem
Smith focused on traditional painting, training through life drawing and working in oils. Her oeuvre includes portraits, florals, landscapes, still lifes and horses. Her paintings can be described as both optically real and occasionally impressionistic in subject embracing still life, portraiture, genre and flowers. Of her work Smith has said, “I paint the world I live in, the things I know. I’m not making political statements. I aspire to the paintings of Degas, Sargent and Ingres.”

Smith was a member of the Cosmos Club in DC since 1989, a board member at the Museum of Women in the Arts, and on the Board of Commissioners at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Since 2000, Clarice Smith had four solo exhibitions at major institutions, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2009), The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA (2011), The NewYork Historical Society, New York (2013), and the National Sporting Library and Museum, Middleburg, VA (2014). Her last museum exhibition was in 2016- a show which focused on a collaborative artwork – a painted triptych screen supported and framed by ironwork by Albert Paley. This exhibition took place at the Kreeger Museum in Washington, D.C.

She was first represented by the Kennedy Galleries and then with Gerald Peters Gallery in New York City from 2009.