Biography
Dr. Craig Smith is an American media artist whose art and research focuses on the process, aesthetics, and ethics of human‐to‐human interactivity in contemporary art, especially photography, sound, and socially engaged performances. Smith and his contemporaries are active in a diverse, media-enriched and socially engaged cultural field in which curating and the production of spaces of encounter are conceptualized, defined, and instrumentalized.
Smith has been awarded grants from numerous organizations including the New York State Council on the Arts as well as the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Smith’s books about art practice and social engagement include Training Manual for Relational Art as well as On the Subject of the Photographic. Smith’s forthcoming book publication, entitled Relational Art: A Guided Tour, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2023.
Smith creates original compositions and sound recordings with Lunacy Records and publishes with Lunasongs Music. His Lunacy releases include the full length sound art LP Parasite, two EPs (Endless Nights and Special Chivalry), the 7" single Storms of the South/The Performing Machine, and the spoken word project Family of Man. Smith has created museum and theater installations and performances featuring these sound recordings at the Cantor Film Center in New York City, the Central Academy of Fine Arts- Beijing, the Burchfield Penney Art Center - Buffalo, and the Price Tower Arts Center as well as the Larry P Walker Arts District in the State of Oklahoma (a lovely, tucked away place where Smith and other persons were born).
In 2019 and 2020 Smith's time-based media was part of the Visibility Matrix curated by Gerard Byrne and Sven Anderson and exhibited in the Vienna Succession, the Toulouse Biennial, and the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. In 2022 Smith has been a part of the Exquisite Moving Corpse, curated by Jask Massing, Chip Lord, and Sean Miller and on view in multiple countries as well as cities across the United States through 2023. Smith's work has also been featured at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., PS1MOMA Contemporary Art Institute in New York, The Tate Modern in London, The George Eastman House in Rochester, the Hudson River Museum, the Mao Live House (Beijing), CEPA Gallery (Buffalo), Galerie Schuster Photo (Berlin), RARE Art (New York), SCM Hong Kong, ARTSPACE Sydney, The Kent Gallery and White Columns (New York), and the Elsewhere Museum (Greensboro NC).
From 2014-2021 Smith was the Director of Culture for Column Health, LLC and the curator of unaffiliate.us based in Boston MA at Column Health. Column Health is an expanded mental health care service with more than one dozen clinics in Massachusetts. Smith helped to create the public face and clinical enviornments for eleven of the clinics as they opened between 2015 and 2021. In 2017 unaffiliate.us curated an exhibition by Tom Fruin for the Scope International Art Fair in Miami. In 2019 and 2020, unaffiliate.us curated the haute couture project Ghillie Suit Series, featuring the work of multiple anonymous artists assembled as unique representations of persons who are now deceased from opiate use and overdoses. The ghillie suits were on display, and actively interfacing with audiences, at The Spectrum and Scope International Art Fairs in Miami and New York. In 2013 Smith curated the exhibition Art of Sport using diverse conceptual aesthetic modes to address the social engagement with a culture of competitive sports in the United States and abroad. The exhibition featured an international group of artists including Lee Walton, John Baldessari, Matthew Bakkom, Daria Martin, Paul Pfeiffer, Brad Beesely, Mitch Miller, Hans van der Meer, Vesna Pavlovic' and Catherine Opie.
Smith has held teaching positions at numerous universities and colleges including New York University, Goldsmiths College, and the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London). Smith joined the University of Florida in 2010.