1970s Howard Smith Signed Screenprint. Printed on thick matte paper which is lightly textured with beautiful detailing. Artist print signed and part of limited series 24/7100. Featuring the artist's iconic use of bold bright colors and abstract design.

Size: 36”W x 24”H

Condition: Excellent condition with faint scuff bottom right.

About the Artist - Howard Smith

Howard Smith was born in 1928 in Moorestown, New Jersey, and grew up there. As a young man he served with U.S. occupying forces in postwar Japan, Korea, and Germany, then came home and briefly studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. In 1962 he traveled to Finland to help organize an international youth exhibition of American artists, and simply stayed. Within a year he'd mounted his first solo show at Matti Viherjuuri's Galleria Pinx in Helsinki. He was drawn to the Finnish "less is more" design ethos and its deep respect for craft, and he quickly earned the friendship and respect of major Finnish figures like ceramicist Kaj Franck, architect Aarno Ruusuvuori, and designers Antti and Vuokko Nurmesniemi.

Over the following decades Smith became one of the few Black artists of his generation to build a real career inside Scandinavian industrial design. His exuberant, colorful textile patterns were produced by firms like Vallila Interiors, and he later became a visiting artist at the Arabia ceramics factory in Helsinki, designing for them from 1986 to 1995. He spent one stretch back in the U.S., living in Southern California from 1976 to 1984 after being invited to teach at Scripps College, where he exhibited at UCLA and the Museum of African American Art, though he described himself as still something of an outsider there: a Finnish expatriate working through questions of race and representation as the Black Arts Movement was winding down.

What really stands out is the restless variety of his studio practice. Painting, sculpture, drawing, assemblage, screen-printing, ceramics, collage; he moved between them freely, and improvised with strange materials. He repurposed old army field jackets into wall sculptures, turned vintage hats into shamanistic-looking masks, and pushed simple paper-cutting into elaborate, museum-quality compositions that fused abstract shapes with African symbols. He mounted more than 40 solo exhibitions in his lifetime, yet remained almost unknown in the U.S. because he'd left so early, recognized mainly by a small circle of design collectors until a 2024 retrospective, "The Art and Design of Howard Smith," opened at the Palm Springs Art Museum in collaboration with Finland's Espoo Museum of Modern Art, marking his first major U.S. showing since the 1980s. In 1988 he and ceramic artist Erna Aaltonen (who became his wife) founded the collaborative Arteos Studio, and in 1996 they settled in Fiskars, a small artists' village near Helsinki, where he lived until his death in 2021.