Exhibition
Keith Smith at Home
When
Feb 17, 2018 – Jul 8, 2018
Where
Library Reading Room, Second Floor, Perelman Building
Tickets
A life on paper
Friendship, love, desire: Keith Smith's life is an open book. For five decades, the Rochester-based artist has used surprising combinations of materials to chronicle his experiences. In this exhibition, explore an array of Smith's mixed-media photographs and prints, and—his specialty—handmade artist's books, most from his own collection.
In his work, Keith Smith irreverently disregards the supposed dividing lines between "fine art" (photography, etching, watercolor), "craft" (sewing, quilting, bookmaking), and "utilitarian technologies" (transparencies, photocopies). Although his subject matter is rooted in his personal life, he also grapples with universal themes such as self-representation, domesticity, and intimacy.
Smith frequently remarks that he is shy in life but not in his pictures. While he is a prolific artist who has enjoyed a successful teaching career and numerous exhibitions, he makes no secret about his reclusiveness. For him, "home" includes not only the physical confines of his house, but also his meditative introspection, his close-knit circle of friends and family, and his perpetual striving toward feeling "at home" in his own skin.
Related Exhibition: Keith Smith: Word Play
February 15–July 6, 2018
Explore the ways in which contemporary artist Keith Smith uses word play, poetry, typography, and sequencing to create surprising relationships between image and text in his artist's books. Since the mid-1960s, Smith has created over 300 books. While the bulk of his oeuvre consists of one-of-a-kind artist's books, he has also published small-edition works and book-length poems along with short dictionaries made for his personal use while writing. Smith is also known for his textbooks for aspiring book artists, including the influential Structure of the Visual Book and Text in the Book Format. Based on years of creative exploration, teaching, and collaboration, these self-published instructional texts are also available to view in the museum's Library.
About the Artist
Keith Smith (American, born Indiana, 1938) has made over 300 artist's books and has written over half a dozen seminal instructional manuals on bookbinding. His work is represented in leading public and private collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships (1972 and 1980) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1978). Smith has taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, where he currently resides.
Preview the Exhibition
Book Number 141
Keith Smith
Preview the Exhibition
Book Number 82, Keith Smith at Home, 1982
Artist's book with gelatin silver prints, colored ink washes, pen and ink, and decorative paper bordersSmith describes this as "a book of moods." Through the sequence of deceptively straightforward photographs— taken primarily in and around the artist's home—Smith shows how rooms can be storytellers and repositories of emotions, ideas, and memories. Some spaces and vignettes repeat, but the artist colored each iteration differently and moved or replaced their framed pictures and bric-a-brac with others. Are we seeing the passage of time or carefully arranged altars to a particular person or moment in time? ​Courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York
Book Number 11, Up , 1969
Artist's book with ballpoint pen, graphite, and porous point (felt tip) pen on graph paper; film-positives; and collaged and cut gelatin silver printsConsisting primarily of self-portraits drawn from dreams, this book features imagery on transparent and opaque pages. As the transparent pages are turned, the underlying imagery from adjacent pages remains visible. In the two spreads shown in this slide show, rainbow zigzags, snakes, and a blank face interact with an image of a bearded man in profile on a transparency. The snakes are perhaps a nod to the mythical snake-haired Medusa, a motif that recurs throughout the book. ​Courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York
Curators
Amanda Bock, the Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs
Sponsors
Support for this exhibition was provided by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.