Keith Smith American, b. 1938

Keith Smith (b. 1938) is an American artist, published poet and author, and distinguished lecturer. As a pioneering book artist, Smith blends photography, printmaking, drawing, and unconventional materials to expand the possibilities of the book form. Over more than five decades, he has created more than 300 unique artist’s books that often resist traditional structures. Smith’s books are stitched, folded, unbound, or pierced with holes, transforming sequence and structure into essential elements of meaning. His works chronicle his life experiences and explore memory, desire, poetry, and identity in ways that unfold across time. Smith creates work that exists in a realm of its own; intersecting fine art, craft, and utilitarian technologies. He has additionally written over half a dozen seminal instructional manuals on bookbinding.

Born in Tipton, Indiana in 1938, Smith studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (B.A.E., 1967) and earned an M.S. in Photography from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1968. While still a student, he held his first solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Smith has since exhibited internationally with major solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (1975), the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (1988), the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (2000), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which presented the retrospective Keith Smith at Home in 2018.

Smith’s work is represented in the permanent collections of leading institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, George Eastman Museum, National Gallery of Art, and Victoria & Albert Museum in London. He has been recognized with numerous awards, among them two Guggenheim Fellowships (1972 and 1980), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1978), New York Foundation for the Arts support (1985), and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2002).

Alongside his studio practice, Smith has been a prolific educator and author. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLA, the University of Illinois, and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester. His influential instructional texts, such as Structure of the Visual Book and Books Without Paste or Glue, have become foundational references for artists and bookbinders worldwide. Smith lives and works in Rochester, New York.