{"id":200738,"date":"2025-10-04T02:51:19","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T02:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/200738\/"},"modified":"2025-10-04T02:51:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T02:51:19","slug":"the-black-american-artist-who-found-himself-in-finland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/200738\/","title":{"rendered":"The Black American Artist Who Found Himself in Finland\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

PALM SPRINGS \u2014 Howard Smith, who passed away in 2021 at age 92, was an African-American artist, designer, and teacher, born in New Jersey and educated at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. In 1962, he was invited by a friend to participate in Young America Presents, a cultural festival in Helsinki, publicly sponsored by the United States but secretly funded by the CIA. Smith, who felt marginalized by the mainstream White art world and out of place with the Black art world in the United States, found an audience and a home in post-Cold War Finland, where he was one of the only Black artists. Over the next 50 years, Smith produced an impressive range of paintings, sculptures, textiles, ceramics, and mixed-media assemblages. He won the Finnish State Design Prize in 2001, and in 2003, he was recognized as a national treasure when he was awarded an artist\u2019s pension from the Finnish state<\/a>. Despite his fame in the European nation, however, Smith has remained virtually unknown in the States. The Art and Design of Howard Smith<\/a> at the Palm Springs Art Museum is the first retrospective of Smith\u2019s works in his home country.<\/p>\n

The retrospective is beguiling because it blurs the distinctions between art, design, and d\u00e9cor.\u00a0I was struck by the tensions between Smith\u2019s minimal black and white works, the almost wall-sized floral textiles, and some smaller but blockier pieces, reminiscent of second-wave Color field artists like Morris Louis<\/a>, Kenneth Noland<\/a>, and Helen Frankenthaler<\/a>. The lineup of the exhibition writ large feels like a bizarre mashup of Joan Mir\u00f3<\/a>, Adolph Gottlieb<\/a>, Robert Motherwell<\/a>, and William Baziotes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tHoward Smith, \u201cBlack Angel\u201d (1970), screenprint on paper<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s surfaces are less energetic and less technically skilled than those, but more playful. It is Smith\u2019s playfulness (but also his skill) that enables him to produce enormous textiles that somehow go beyond design to flirt with what we might call \u201cart.\u201d Some of the more memorable pieces on view straddle the seemingly paradoxical world of design and politics, such as \u201cUntitled\u201d from 1985.\u00a0Here, the large graphic patterns and expressive forms that came to embody Finnish design morph into serpentine facial details. The long, slender necks and elongated heads evoke African sculptural traditions like Dan Masks <\/a>or even the Clayman Fang Head<\/a>. Smith\u2019s representation of Blackness within an overwhelmingly White Scandinavian art world is a profound instance of simultaneous engagement and resistance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Though Smith thrived as a designer in Finland, he aspired to be an artist of political consequence. One example: \u201cAmerica?,\u201d a mixed-media collage on wood that foregrounds a silhouetted head in profile against a whitewashed background. Above and to the left of the figure\u2019s nose are four newspaper clippings. The only fully legible phrases are \u201cNumber 1\u201d and \u201cThe Kremlin Mood.\u201d Smith contextualizes this piece via an inscription on the back: \u201cThis work was done at and after the Montgomery Riots,\u201d most likely in reference to either the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march<\/a> or the assault on the Freedom Riders<\/a> in 1961. Possibly intended as a powerful statement on the many contradictions of America, it misses its mark. The title is too precise, the figure not precise enough, the text both too on-point and too elusive.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tHoward Smith, \u201cUntitled\u201d (1985), paper cut on handmade paper (photo courtesy Palm Springs Art Museum)<\/p>\n

More successful is \u201cBlack Angel\u201d (1970), a lovely screen print on paper that marries Smith\u2019s signature Scandinavian sense of design with the Japanese notion of ma \u2014 the harmonious use of negative space. I love the proportionality of the angel with its block bottom and winged torso, suggesting both groundedness and flight. The thin red vertical line, slightly diagonal, connects the internal energy of the angel with the red crown or red dome or red heaven above. The starkness of the angel connotes power, strength. This piece does similar cultural work to \u201cAmerica?\u201d but does not get lost in the rhetoric of figuration and explication, instead hitting the sweet spot between art, design, and cultural commentary. The work simultaneously talks to American Abstract Expressionism, Scandinavian Design, and Japanese minimalism, but nevertheless remains fully Smith.<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s astonishingly broad body of work made me rethink the rather arbitrary distinctions between the various tiers of aesthetic production. It will be fascinating to see if this exhibition and the generous bilingual exhibition catalog will alter Smith\u2019s reputation in this nation. I suspect \u2014 and hope \u2014 they will.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tHoward Smith, \u201cYellow Iris 4 X\u201d (1978), commercial screenprint (photo by and courtesy RJ S\u00e1nchez\/Solstream Studios)
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\tInstallation view of The Art and Design of Howard\u00a0Smith<\/p>\n

The Art and Design of Howard\u00a0Smith<\/a> continues at Palm Springs Art Museum (101 North Museum Drive, Palm Springs, California) through February 23, 2026. The exhibition was co-organized by the Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland, and curated by Steven Wolf.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PALM SPRINGS \u2014 Howard Smith, who passed away in 2021 at age 92, was an African-American artist, designer,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200739,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,2356,229,88],"class_list":["post-200738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-california","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200738\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}