Keith Smith American, b. 1938

Keith Smith (b. 1938) is an American artist, poet, author and educator whose work has fundamentally expanded the possibilities of the artist’s book. Since Book Number 1 in 1967, he has created more than three hundred unique books, stitched, folded, pierced with holes or left unbound, in which sequence, structure and the act of turning pages become integral to meaning. His subjects are drawn from his own life: love and desire, friendship and domesticity, and, across the body of work, his ongoing effort to reckon with his sexual identity. “I had to use books because it would allow me to have flow and movement,” he has said. “The pages have to give up their independence in order to form a union.”

Born in Tipton, Indiana, Smith studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning a BAE in 1967, and received an MS in photography from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1968, where Aaron Siskind and Arthur Siegel were then teaching. His resistance to categorization made him a maverick within both the photography and printmaking departments, and he has challenged the boundaries between fine art, craft and utilitarian technology ever since, sewing photographs into quilts as readily as binding them into books. While still a student, he had his first solo exhibition, Photographs, Photo-Etchings, Clichés-Verre by Keith Smith, at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1968.

Subsequent solo exhibitions were presented at George Eastman House and the Visual Studies Workshop in 1970, The Museum of Modern Art in 1975, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts in 1988 and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2000. His work was included in Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 (1978). Smith received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1972 and 1980, an NEA fellowship in 1978, support from NYFA in 1985 and a Pollock-Krasner grant in 2002. He taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLA, the University of Illinois and the Visual Studies Workshop. His instructional books, including Structure of the Visual Book, Text in the Book Format and the five-volume Non-Adhesive Binding series, have become standard texts for artists working in the book form.

Smith has been exclusively represented by Bruce Silverstein Gallery since 2011. In 2018, the Philadelphia Museum of Art presented Keith Smith at Home, his first monographic exhibition in five decades. Centered on Book Number 82 (1982), a sequence of views of his Rochester house that he describes as a “book of moods,” the exhibition revealed how intimately his bookmaking intertwines the structures of daily life with the formal possibilities of the medium. That same year, the Getty Research Institute included his work in Artists and Their Books, Books and Their Artists.

Smith’s work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the George Eastman Museum, the Getty, the Harvard Art Museums, The Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has worked in Rochester for more than four decades, pursuing an independent practice largely apart from the commercial art world.