Description

This major exhibition of work by the prominent American minimalist Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996)  aims to explore the artist’s work in the context of his Cherokee identity. Customarily understoood as a canonical minimalist whose aesthetic emerged directly from the trajectory of Euro-American abstraction, Smth derived considerble inspration from the traditional Tribal art and crafts with which he came into contact during his youth on Chickasha lands in Oklahoma, and later as a Guggenheim fellow painting in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The presentation will justapose Smith’s reductive, hard-edged compositions with Native Plains and Prairie Indian drums, shields, parfleche containers of the kind that were formative for the painter’s explorations of color, space, and innovative uses of stretched canvas. The Native American objects will be drawn largely from the Heard’s collection.