Patterson Sims and Dana Miller on Leon Polk Smith: Endless Space at Richard Gray Gallery

President of the Leon Polk Smith Foundation Patterson Sims and independent curator and art historian Dana Miller join in conversation at Gray Warehouse to reflect on preeminent hard-edge abstract painter Leon Polk Smith. Sims and Miller examine Smith's multilayered approach to painting through his Constellation and Correspondence series. Discussing the ways in which Smith’s brightly colored, multi-panel compositions push the boundaries of the canvas, the two scholars consider how queer theory and the artist's rural upbringing might add new and timely layers of interpretation.
"He was very much the product of where he'd come from," says Sims, describing Smith's Oklahoma roots. "[Leon] spoke Cherokee as a younger person, and he was in a large agrarian family ... You never could've expected that it was going to lead to a life as a leading geometric abstract painter who's work would have international significance and meaning."
Video © Gray Chicago/New York. Production by David C. Sampson.