Michael Smith: Drawings: Simple, Obscure and Obtuse

by Michael Smith (Artist)

This artist's book chronicles a lifetime of drawings by the performance/video/installation artist Michael Smith. Smith is best known for his alter ego, "Mike," whose blend of satisfaction and yearning, humor and pathos, makes him an all-American anti-hero. Smith's wide range of art activities in television, performance, stand-up and puppet shows, as well as installation, sculpture and video, have influenced a generation of young artists. This book is composed of mostly-unseen material from private notebooks: sketches, notations, diagrams and storyboards, as well as finished and childhood drawings, giving the reader a fly-on-the-wall view into Smith's mind and creative process. Smith's newest video work, created at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, will show at P.S. 1/MoMA, in February of 2007, and a traveling exhibition begins at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas in August, 2007.

144 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2007

About the author

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Michael Smith is an U.S. performance artist. Throughout his career, Smith has been actively engaged as a lecturer, critic, artist, and instructor at a number of prestigious institutions, among them Yale University, the Royal Danish Academy, and UCLA. Smith currently serves as Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has been teaching performance art since 2001. In 2007 Smith received The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award and The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) honored both he and Joshua White for their multi-disciplinary work; Smith has received numerous other fellowships and awards, including those from the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (2005-6), Art Matters Inc (1996, 1990, 1987), the National Endowment for the Arts (1991, 1983, 1982, 1978), and the Guggenheim Foundation (1985).