Photographer Steven B. Smith in Art Department Visiting Artist Program

Rhode Island photographer Steven B. Smith travels to Logan and is featured in a number of activities at Utah State University as part of the Department of Art’s Visiting Artist Program.

Smith will be on campus March 23-24, and presents a public lecture Monday, March 23, at 7 p.m. in the Performance Hall (approximately 1090 E. 675 North, Logan). The lecture is free and open to all.

 

In addition, Smith will present a workshop for photo students from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday, March 24.

 

USU art department programs are a part of the Caine School of the Arts, based in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

 

Smith is a photographer whose work has chronicled the transition of the western landscape into suburbia. For this work he was awarded the First Book Prize for Photography by the Honickman Foundation and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West, was published by Duke University Press (2005).

 

Smith received his bachelor’s of fine art from Utah State University and his master’s of fine art from Yale School of Art. He has received Guggenheim and Aaron Siskind fellowships. His work can be found in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has taught photography at Yale and at Brown University and currently lives in Providence, R.I., where he teaches in the photography department at Rhode Island School of Design.

 

USU art department faculty member Craig Law described Smith’s work and his place in the art world.

 

“Because of Steve’s roots growing up in the Intermountain West, he has an empathy and understanding of his subject that is exceptional,” Law said. “The resulting images he produces ring true and are a significant contribution to the great body of work done by earlier image makers in the American West.”

 

The Visiting Artist Program presents visits by nationally known artists, art critics/writers and art historians. Lectures, workshops, group discussions and exhibitions by the artists are free and open to the public. The guests are selected for their national and international reputations, the ways in which their art reflects diversity with respect to the media used and their varied backgrounds.

 

The Visiting Artist Program is funded by a grant from the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Utah Humanities Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Utah Arts Council, with funding from the State of Utah, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

Future guests in this year’s Visiting Artist Program include potter Chris Gustin from Massachusetts (April 1) and graphic designer Golan Levin from Pennsylvania (April 8).

 

For more information about the Visiting Artist Program at USU, contact program director Marilyn Krannich, (435) 797-7373.

 

 

Source: Art Department
Contact: Marilyn Krannich, (435) 797-7373