Bob Smith was born in Springfield, MA, in 1944 and died of AIDS in Miami in 1990. A graduate in Graphics from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, he was awarded a Charles H. Whitman traveling scholarship by the museum in 1969. He traveled to Europe, deciding to settle and work in Madrid after a one year stay in Morocco where he learned the craft of wood and silver inlay. In Madrid, his work was soon brought to public attention by Galeria Vandrés, the most prominent avant-garde gallery in Spain during the seventies.
Between 1971 and 1977, he exhibited regularly in Spain, France, Germany, Italy and was included in the 1973 Biennale de Paris at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris. His work of that period consists mostly of drawings, prints and paintings and is largely inspired by his travels to Europe, the Middle East and Morocco, personal experiences and emotions.
In 1977, Smith decided to return to the United States and settled in New York City, sharing a loft in then deserted Tribeca with video artist Michel Auder. He became friends with many artists and poets such as Alice Neel, Gregory Corso, Gary Indiana, Larry Rivers, Taylor Mead, Eric Bogosian, Annie Sprinkle, Spalding Gray, Bob Holman, Carole Bovoso (IONE), dancers and choreographers Jack Waters and Blondell Cummings, and composer Meredith Monk, collaborating on projects with several of them. Hired as a visual artist to work for the Ceta V-Jobs Act connected with the Cultural Council Foundation, he taught seniors and adults with intellectual disabilities. He also created a large mural for permanent installation at the Dyckman Job Center in Inwood, Manhattan.
In the harsh realities of 1980s New York, he became interested in people's fantasies and dreams, which materialized in a series of paintings. Having participated in "dream workshops," he then transplanted the experience at his friends’ homes, photographing them during their sleep and having them recount their dreams in the morning, giving shape to his series “Sleepers and Dreamers,” inspired by the original Carole Bovoso experiment.
He also started giving a new life to discarded and selected materials that he had been collecting since 1977. "At the beginning it was mainly a financial necessity for materials,” he said, “then it turned out to be a very rewarding and creative approach for me. The selection of materials and collection of memories (I call the mind a filing cabinet) with a subconscious union of putting matter together - uniting form and symbols into a relationship, like a marriage in a work forever." Found drawers of all sorts housed these encounters. These "Boxed Environments" and "Wall Constructions" allowed him to combine his spatial and formal interests with his poetic vision, humor, or combative spirit. A 2022 retrospective at Martos Gallery in Manhattan focused on these works.
In 1982, with an Alumni Traveling Scholarship from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, he went to Denmark to work on sculpture and in 1988 with a residency at MacDowell, he conceived and started working on “The Empire of a Dream” birch architectures, which he went on to develop in France where he spent several summers visiting the castles of the Loire Valley and the Gardens at Giverny. "It is about a universal dream and necessity of all living creatures. It is about a home – a garden..." he said about the works.
In the late eighties, enduring the debilitating symptoms of AIDS, he moved to Miami and became active with various groups, helping through art to bring excitement to what was then the final stages of his life and the lives of members of his community there.
He would describe his life and work with these few lines: "My work uses the past and present, the esoteric and the commonplace, social and political messages along with religious icons and personal journeys. Travel has always been an important resource in my work – using another culture’s myths and treasures along with my personal experiences of the moment, expressing my identification with the collective, as well as my isolation, to tell a visual story of facts, dream states, old proverbs and archetypes.” (Artist Space Anniversary Show, New York, 1984)
Bob Smith photo and bio courtesy of the Bob Smith Estate. The bio has been edited for length; read the full version on the Estate's website.
