An energetic personality, laid-back teaching style, platinum blonde spiky hair, wild outfits and a snake tattoo all are characteristics of well-liked NIU associate art professor Debbie Smith-Shank.

Among other faculty members and graduate students, she presented a piece in Thursday’s Women’s History Month art show at the DeKalb Area Women’s Center, 1021 State St.

“I’m a painter, but lately I have been using a lot of mixed media,” Smith-Shank said. “There are more possibilities with more complex media.”

Smith-Shank started working on the triptych piece called “Momento Mori,” or “Remember Death,” when she found out her mother had breast cancer. She wanted to explore the concepts of life and death through the piece, and she said the colors are dead and “stink of death.”

She also uses transparent images of Greek remembrance altars to convey death’s transparency. The altars are put up as a way of giving thanks when someone survives something, she said.

Growing up, Smith-Shank didn’t know a lot about women artists, but she’s found them an inspiration since learning about them. She also is motivated by some of the great male artists like Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning and Vincent Van Gogh, she said.

“I think I always knew I was an artist,” she said of her childhood filled with crayons and huge rolls of newsprint her dad brought home. In those days, she attached paper to the walls of her basement and created a gigantic underwater scene, complete with mermaids.

Smith-Shank attended Indiana University in Bloomington where she received her bachelor’s degree as well as her doctorate in curriculum and instruction with an emphasis in art education and semiotics, the study of signs and symbols in cultures.

She has been an associate professor in the art department since 1992 and was a past president of the Women’s Caucas for the National Art Education.

At NIU, she teaches a course in art education and a women’s studies course about women in art. In the latter there are no exams — just writing assignments analyzing outside art forms and artwork in the textbook.

“I teach people how to teach art. I teach them sign-making through art and sign decoding within visual culture,” Smith-Shank said.

Along the way, she’s gained notoriety for her style. Holly Harris, a psychology graduate student, said Smith-Shank’s teaching style comes from her relaxed personality. Melissa Prentice, a senior English major, agrees.

“I think she presents the material in an interesting and entertaining way, and I think she is dynamic,” Prentice said.

Smith-Shank is fascinated by the goddess form, the focus of much of her artwork and research. She’s even decorated her wrist with a tattoo of a small snake, a goddess form representing the qualities she sees in herself.

“It was my midlife-crisis tattoo,” Smith-Shank said.

Over the next year, Smith-Shank will speak at the National Art Education Association in New York and the American Education Research Association in Seattle. During the summer, she plans to visit southern France and northern Ireland to study ancient female figures in artwork.