Lenard Smith is a first-generation Ghanaian American interdisciplinary artist and educator who lives and works in Los Angeles. For more than 15 years, he has been developing a signature language that combines assemblage sculpture and still life photography. Research lives at the center of his practice; scholarship on the African diaspora and architecture lead him back to the studio.
He has exhibited his work throughout the United States and abroad; published six artist books, including Refuge (Perimeter Editions, 2024), Melancholy Objects (Perimeter Editions, 2022); and contributed photography to The New York Times and The Atlantic. His work is included in the permanent collections of The Whitney and Lee Kaplan African American Visual Culture Collection at the Getty Research Institute, Light Work (Syracuse, NY), and the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
He received an M.F.A. in advanced photographic studies from Bard College, which grounds his work in traditional practices and experimental methodologies. Smith is currently a visiting assistant professor in the department of art at the University of California, Riverside.
At MacDowell, Smith worked on daily meditation. In his first week in residence, he presented work as part of MacDowell Downtown. In the following weeks, he focused on his studio practice, which involved making sculptures, photographs, field recordings, video, and a new series of 50 paintings presented as works on paper. His morning routine of two hours of research in The James Baldwin Library has given him new material to inject into future projects. While in residence, he received a Pollock-Krasner Award, and in his last days at MacDowell, he was able to climb to the top of Mount Monadnock with several other Fellows. Smith then returned to his home in Los Angeles to begin his second year as a visiting assistant professor at UC Riverside Art Department in January 2025.
