New Acquisition: Works by Keith Smith

Celebrating his major impact on the development of photographic practice, the George Eastman Museum recently acquired work by Rochester-based artist Keith Smith for its photography collection and for its Richard and Ronay Menschel Library.

Smith is best known for his elaborate artist’s books, but his earliest work was
in drawing, printing, and photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which he graduated in 1967. The following year, he earned an MFA in Photography from the Institute of Design. He joined the faculty of Nathan Lyons’s Visual Studies Workshop in 1974, after three years teaching at his undergraduate alma mater. His approach combines multiple mediums seamlessly, and his photographs are rarely, if ever, straightforward views of happened-upon subject matter. Instead, they are ingredients to be sewn, cut, folded, drawn on, and combined to form rich tapestries that are at the same time intimately personal and broadly relevant.

The Department of Photography’s recent acquisitions demonstrate the quality and range of Smith’s engagement with photography. The group includes two self-portraits (My Face with Fried Eggs and Peeled) — a major motif in his oeuvre; a print that uses one of his drawings as a negative (Untitled from Roadside Attractions); and several that incorporate sewing, cutting, and-coloring, and unconventional printing techniques, such as Bonnie Donohue, for which he used 3M’s color electrostatic printing process (a precursor to color xeroxing), and Aatis Lillstrom , which he made by using his hand to apply developer to the print in the darkroom. Untitled [red things], a collage of black-and-white images depicting objects that are red, features his distinctive visual/verbal wit. As a whole, the works summarize Smith’s innovative contributions to the history of photography as an eminently malleable, creative enterprise.

The Richard and Ronay Menschel Library’s concurrent acquisition of two artist’s books further demonstrate Smith’s wide range of medium, materials, and technique. Book Number 147 combines photography, painting, and bookbinding into a solid cube that unfolds into a strikingly intimate mosaic. In Book Number 126: In Between Lines, Smith overlays gelatin silver prints with transparent pages. Each layer contains words that combine into sentences whose meanings shift as the pages turn.

Smith was the subject of a monographic exhibition last year at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work is in the permanent collection there, as well as at 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, among many other institutions. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships (1972 and 1980) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1978).