New program

Tony Smith Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of new public programs, publishing initiatives, and a website that advance the foundation’s mission to support the visual arts by placing the work and legacy of the acclaimed American artist and architect in dialogue with contemporary art and design. With these objectives, TSF will engage Smith’s wide-ranging creative and intellectual pursuits by activating new perspectives, scholarship, publications, and interpretations of the artist’s transdisciplinary practice.

Under the direction of curator and art historian James Voorhies, TSF’s multifaceted research platform seeks to gather a network of individuals and organizations, or “traveling companions,” committed to thinking with, against, and around the work of Tony Smith and the modernist era out of which it developed.

In Dialogue
Comprising public talks, seminars, exhibitions, and excursions, “In Dialogue” nomadic programs will be realized in conversation with artists, art historians, curators, and designers, and organized in collaboration with arts institutions, archives, universities, and private collections.

“Matrix: On the Art of Tom Burr, Torkwase Dyson, and Tony Smith”
Thursday, April 14, 2022, 6pm
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut

The Wadsworth Atheneum’s decisive role in the development of Tony Smith’s artistic career serves as the historical context for a conversation between TSF Executive Director James Voorhies and artists Tom Burr and Torkwase Dyson who, in separate bodies of work, have referenced Smith’s art and modernist ideologies. “Matrix” is co-organized with Patricia Hickson, Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

Research Residency Fellowship
Residency fellowships to conduct research in the Tony Smith Papers—the most comprehensive collection of materials related to the life and work of the artist, housed in New York City—are open to academics, artists, curators, designers, and writers to encourage interdisciplinary and expansive readings of the Smith archive.

Jin Kyung Cho, spring 2022 Research Fellow
New York-based curator and architect Jin Kyung Cho, the inaugural TSF Research Fellow, will conduct research for a project provisionally titled Body and Scale in the Ecological Art and Architecture of Tony Smith.

Applications for the fall Research Residency Fellowship will be accepted beginning May 15, 2022.

Tony Smith Catalogue Raisonné Project
An eight-volume Tony Smith Catalogue Raisonné Project, published by the MIT Press beginning in 2024, will serve as documentation of the depth and complexity of the American artist’s career while simultaneously positioning his oeuvre in conversation with contemporary discourses on art and culture.

The Tony Smith Catalogue Raisonné, a four-volume publication, will put forth the comprehensive record of the artist’s bodies of work—sculpture, architecture, painting, and drawing—to provide objective foundations for future study, interpretation, and analysis of the artist’s work and legacy. Additionally, Against Reason: Tony Smith and Other Modernisms, a four-book companion series, is conceived of as integrated collections of essays and commentary providing insights and renewed perspectives on parallel modernisms and other histories by leading scholars and artists.

Providence and Auckland-based Shan James and James Goggin of Practise will design the Tony Smith Catalogue Raisonné Project.

Archive
TSF’s online publishing platform, Archive, assembles writings, exhibitions, symposia, and works by artists, art historians, curators, and designers. These projects are a combination of work commissioned by the foundation and work realized in other contexts.

About Tony Smith
Tony Smith (b. 1912, South Orange, NJ–d. 1980, New York, NY) occupies an important place in the history of 20th-century art and design. He is best known for his large-scale sculptures—inventive polygonal forms made of steel, most painted black—of the 1960s and ’70s. Yet his intellectual and creative pursuits extended well beyond sculpture to encompass architecture, drawing, painting, and writing. Ultimately, over his career, he blended the improvisational with the analytical, using geometry, mathematics, and science to push against the formal qualities of mediums and conventional expectations for artistic disciplines, and paradoxically complicating the modernist imperative to categorize. The fluid interconnectedness of his bodies of work has appealed to generations of artists who have cited Smith’s influence on their own work.