Howard Smith (PRE-ORDER)

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. The book contains conversations with Ken Erwin (a close friend of Smith) and Erna Aaltonen, Smith’s widow, providing a more intimate glimpse into the life of this artist-designer, who, until recently, has gone largely unrecognized in the US.