The Brooklyn Rail

At the opening of American ex-pat artist Howard Smith’s first retrospective in the United States, a young couple posed next to a screenprint they lent to the exhibition. The print, Black Angel (ca. 1970), features a black flower-like form with a thin red line down its center, under a red rainbow. I asked them how they came to own this work and they told me that they found it in their apartment building’s trash, and quickly snatched it up before they knew anything about Smith, who died in 2021 at age ninety-two. The couple, and most viewers, can be forgiven for not knowing about Smith’s six-decade career of screenprints, collages, textiles, stoneware sculptures, ceramics, and commercial design, as he is little-known in America, hopefully until now.

This retrospective posits many reasons why, despite his attempt to return to the US and make a career in Los Angeles, Smith remained most artistically successful in Finland, and Europe. A full range of Smith’s work, arranged not chronologically, but formally, is presented. Some of the first works highlight his use of craft and geometric abstraction: an untitled stitched fabric applique (ca. 1970) illustrates three rows of shapes gesturing towards figuration in bright red and yellow against a deep red background. Across the gallery is a black-and-white stoneware work, a series of square tiles mounted onto wood using a technique he developed as an artist at the Arabia ceramic factory in Helsinki, featuring more angular geometric shapes that recall sharp shadows or protruding body parts. These forms are recognizably part of Smith’s lexicon, as are the simple line works of glyph-like faces that form the curves of a profile silhouetted in black as a paper-cut out or metal sculpture.

The exhibition and accompanying catalogue, published and artfully designed by Radius Books, does much to share Smith’s biography with new audiences. After traveling Europe as an Army soldier from 1949–58, Smith first came to Finland in 1962 for the US anti-Soviet art festival, Young America Presents. He openly worked with commercial design, producing housewares such as curtains and tablecloths for the Vallila design company and dishes while at Arabia, as well as craft and fine art screenprints and sculptures. For Smith, this fluidity of genre was part of his goal of making accessible art. He is cited throughout the catalogue as having carried a portfolio of his screenprints around with him on the street to sell, thinking of them as “design multiples”—the same lens under which he thought of his commercial designs.

The paper-cut works are especially impressive, showing Smith’s method of drawing with scissors, creating elegant profiles and figures in monochrome black. Enlarged as carved wood silhouettes, nearly life-size sculptures, they are striking alongside his brightly colored, floor-to-ceiling, floral pattern textiles. In the gallery, these silhouette sculptures and more monochrome prints are installed on brightly colored green walls, an unnecessary flourish to connect them with his Pop-colored works. The enormous screenprinted fabrics are certainly boldly colored enough to hang against white walls, a reflection of their intention as commercial design patterns for decorating everyday homes.

Notably, while most of the works in the exhibition are untitled, Smith did name one of his most popular Vallila designs, featuring white flowers blossoming against a beige background, Makeba after the South African activist and singer Miriam Makeba. While one could easily look at much of Smith’s work and perhaps not consider his race, his Blackness was very much a part of his life in America and Finland, and was not left out of his art. His early works from the 1960s tend towards more assemblages and combines, though they hang on the wall. His mixed media collage titled America? (1965) includes fragments of newspaper text and illustrations behind a black silhouette of a head in profile. According to the curator Steven Wolf, Smith has inscribed on the verso, “This work was done at and after the Montgomery Riots.” He made a number of early works using found and recycled jackets and coats. “Based on vintage photos,” Wolf writes, “the most striking examples appear to be found motorcycle and army jackets embellished with military and police paraphernalia that one imagines reference the racial and political-military context surrounding Smith’s life to that point.” Elsewhere in the catalogue, his wife and fellow artist Erna Aaltonen recalls another jacket work: “this one had black gloves hanging out of the sleeves. It was named Who is afraid of a black man? It was such a wonderful, hilarious work!” The playfulness and humor in Smith’s work is hand-in-hand with difficult subtext.

After his success in Finland, he tried to return to America in the hopes of reconnecting with the Black American community and culture. He relocated to Los Angeles in 1976, but other than the support of artist and gallerist Samella Lewis, Smith failed to find the connection or artistic success he was looking for, and returned to Finland in 1984, where he remained for the rest of his life. Throughout the exhibition, the question looms of whether it is his ex-pat status, his race, his refusal to work in one media, or perhaps a combination of all that has kept Smith’s larger legacy from growing. In a lengthy interview with Lewis, Smith notes of his brief move back to the US, “I had the feeling that some of the things I wanted to do or some of the things I did were either overlooked or not received in the way that I hoped they would. This was primarily because I was not addressing myself to the right audience, and the right audience for some of my things was not in Finland.” But Wolf concludes that Smith could not find this audience in 1970s Los Angeles, in part because the community there felt he had escaped during the worst time of American racism and the civil rights movement.

Surprisingly, Wolf asks in his essay, “Would Smith be disappointed, then, to learn that the first person in the twenty-first century to examine his work through the lens of his Black heritage is a White curator? Would he worry that his experience of Blackness, and the role it plays in his work, would continue to be misread and mispresented?” It is an impossible question to answer, a question I also often ask myself as a white woman writing about the work of Black artists. But I commend the museum for raising this question openly, and presenting the work in a display that foregrounds both the formal and social relevance of Smith’s art: as beautifully complex mixtures of material and line; and as part of the story of America during the Cold War and civil rights movement; and as an important part of the history of industry and craft in Europe.