Palm Springs Art Museum will showcase the work of Howard Smith for the first time in the United States since the 1980s.

Smith (1928-2021) was an artist from New Jersey whose textiles and ceramics were produced by some of Scandinavia’s biggest design firms during the heyday of post-war modernism. One of the few Black artists of his generation to successfully collaborate with industry, he brought exuberant color to curtain design and decorated his ceramics with a unique pictorial language that fused abstract forms with African symbols.

In his studio work, Smith did it all: painting, sculpture, drawing, assemblage, screen-printing, ceramics, and collage. He adapted army field jackets into wall sculpture, contrived shamanistic masks from vintage hats, and elevated the humble paper cut into high art with elaborate compositions.

Smith had over 40 solo exhibitions during his life. Yet, because he emigrated to Finland in 1962, he is unknown to all but a small group of design connoisseurs in the United States. His unique body of work is the product of an artist contending with the grand historical forces of his time: racism, modernism, cold-war ideology, and the African diaspora. This will be the first retrospective of Smith in his home country.