Laura Smith usually swims in the ocean three times a week. She dislikes the chlorinated water of swimming pools. But for the past decade, the Chinatown-based artist has been making woodcut prints of swimmers in pools to represent the daily challenges people face.

“In my work the pool is the metaphor for the world,” the 68-year-old said. “In the risky end, the deep end, we’re not sure if we can survive that. There is the shallow end, where things are predictable. But everybody has to go to the deep end at some point.”

Smith was chosen this year as the featured artist for the 37th annual “Commitment to Excellence” exhibition, opening Tuesday and continuing through Aug. 20 at the Honolulu Museum of Art School. This juried show is unusual because of its sponsorship and volunteer support by the business community, through the Honolulu Japanese Chamber of Commerce, and its openness to any artist who wants to submit work.

That broad appeal led to 402 submissions this year, which were culled by jurors down to the 54 pieces being presented in various media forms, in addition to Smith’s swimmers prints, including ceramics, paintings, sculptures, textiles and photography, said Nicole Yabuki, a chamber spokeswoman.

For the centerpiece of this exhibition, Smith — who served as executive director of Honolulu Printmakers for 25 years, and as a founder of the Honolulu Printmaking Workshop, before she retired — has created a wall of blue paper tiles to represent a pool. She has suspended in front of that wall prints of swimmers cut out of paper. Four pedestals nearby showcase her 3-D art books containing her thematic watery work from the past 10 years.

“Even though you are in the pool with other people, swimming still is an individual activity,” she said. “It’s not like walking or running or biking, when you can talk with your friends. … Swimming also involves a lot of practice. People repeat drills and swim laps a certain number of times. Printmaking is a little like that. You have these ideas, and you have to keep printing proofs, to see what they are going to be like, to learn what the plate is like. There’s a discipline to it, a lot of repetition in both swimming and printmaking.”

Wayne Kawamoto, exhibition design assistant at the University of Hawaii Art Gallery, said he and others involved with the show had tried for a few years to get Smith in the featured role. But she had conflicts with her travel schedule in both 2013 and 2014. Kawamoto said Smith’s name kept coming back up, so he tried again in 2015.

“There are a lot of great artists in Hawaii,” he said. “What sets apart the people we choose to feature is that they do a little bit more than be an artist. They also contribute in some way to the larger community. Laura has been involved with Honolulu Printmakers for ages, and she has been really helpful to a lot of students and artists.”

Kawamoto added that Smith is known for her inventive style of sculptural printmaking, which mixes the medium with the display space, “hanging things and projecting things off walls.”

Reflecting upon her installation theme, Smith said, “I like the idea of the grids of the tiles in the swimming pools and how they contrast with the water that moves around. The swimmer also makes it interesting.”

She has spent about six months preparing for this show, making new work and assembling the books. Even though she crafted a model of her display, to get a sense of what it would look like, she did not have a way to put it up and look at it in full until moving the work into the Honolulu Museum of Art School.

“I keep building on these ideas,” she said. “Even though I have tried a bunch of different things, there’s always a new twist to it and other issues that can be addressed. There’s always something I haven’t said yet. … This show is an opportunity for that. I’m being given a certain amount of space in this gallery. I’m putting together something made just for this exhibition, which is very popular. For me it is like going into the deep end.”