The Art and Design of Howard Smith
May 10, 2025 – March 2, 2026
Palm Springs Art Museum, in collaboration with Espoo Museum of Modern Art, will showcase the work of Howard Smith for the first time in the United States since the 1980s. Smith (1928-2021) was an artist from New Jersey whose textiles and ceramics were produced by some of Scandinavia’s biggest design firms during the heyday of post-war modernism. One of the few Black artists of his generation to successfully collaborate with industry, he brought exuberant color to curtain design and decorated his ceramics with a unique pictorial language that fused abstract forms with African symbols.
In his studio work, Smith did it all: painting, sculpture, drawing, assemblage, screen-printing, ceramics, and collage. He adapted army field jackets into wall sculpture, contrived shamanistic masks from vintage hats, and elevated the humble paper cut into high art with elaborate compositions.
Smith had over 40 solo exhibitions during his life. Yet, because he emigrated to Finland in 1962, he is unknown to all but a small group of design connoisseurs in the United States. His unique body of work is the product of an artist contending with the grand historical forces of his time: racism, modernism, cold-war ideology, and the African diaspora. This will be the first retrospective of Smith in his home country.
Learn more here.
Howard Smith
Blending art and design in a multitude of mediums and integrating references to Black cultural history with the modern tradition of abstraction, Howard Smith is a crucial addition to the story of Western art.
— Adam Lerner / Director, Palm Springs Art Museum
This volume is the first significant monograph dedicated to the multifaceted practice of Howard Smith, a Black artist, designer, and collector born in the United States who spent most of his creative life in Finland, where he is more well known.
Smith worked across media—cut paper, screenprints, wood, metal, textiles, ceramics, and found objects—always balancing his life as an artist with his work in the commercial realm, which included designing interiors, murals, curtains, and tableware. Drawing on numerous influences and pictorial languages, including Finnish informalism, mid-century modernism, the Black Power movement in the US, and African masks, Smith developed a polyglot vocabulary and aesthetic sensibility that permeated all of his work regardless of the context, transcending boundaries between media, between the art and design worlds, and between the two countries he called home.
Howard Smith is a bilingual publication with essays by both American and Finnish scholars appearing in both English and Finnish.