We couldn’t be more thrilled about the glowing reviews for “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith” at the Whitney Museum and John Szwed’s new Harry Smith biography “Cosmic Scholar”! Here are a few of our recent favorites:

“Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith” at the Whitney Museum of American Art:

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts will dole out over $4 million to 48 nonprofit arts organizations as part of its Fall 2022 grant cycle.

The Warhol grants are given out in three categories: two-year support for programming, direct exhibition support, and research fellowships. As part of its continued response to the economic challenges small- and medium-sized arts organizations face as a result of the pandemic, awardees may use up to 50 percent of their grants for administrative expenses, which the foundation believes “ultimately benefit[s] artists by providing crucial support for the stability of non-profit visual arts field,” according to a release.

Grammy Award-winning music scholar and celebrated biographer John Szwed presents the first biography of Harry Smith, the brilliant eccentric who transformed twentieth century art and culture. 

He was an anthropologist, filmmaker, painter, folklorist, mystic, and walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, sat at the piano with Thelonious Monk, lived with (and tortured) Allen Ginsberg, argued film with Susan Sontag, and received one of the first Guggenheim grants. He was always broke, always intoxicated, compulsively irascible, and unimpeachably authentic. Harry Smith was, in the words of Robert Frank, “the only person I met in my life that transcended everything.”

Written by Grayson Haver Currin:

PRE-DISCOGS, MAN HAS RECORDS BUT NO MONEY. TRIES TO SELL THEM, GETS RECORD DEAL INSTEAD. CHANGES AMERICAN MUSIC.

While the other kids were playing marbles or collecting Joe DiMaggio baseball cards, Harry Smith was becoming an amateur ethnologist. When the Oregon-born, Washington State-raised son of a cannery family was still a teenager, Smith jury-rigged a cheap recorder to a big battery. He captured the rituals of the Pacific Northwest’s indigenous Salish tribes as best as his crude technology allowed, a little Lomax of the left coast.

Originally written by Raymond Foye for Brooklyn Rail

For almost sixty years Jordan Belson lived in the same charming corner of San Francisco, the bohemian enclave known as North Beach, named after the region of Italy from where the locals emigrated—the Gulf of Trieste. Rents were cheap and neighbors tolerant. From the mid-1950s, until his death in 2011 at the age of eighty-five, Belson occupied a three-room flat on Montgomery and Vallejo Streets, a dark apartment of exquisite austerity, which I always imagined was inspired by a favorite book of his, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows. The rooms contained beautiful woodwork, rice paper lamps, tatami mats with cushions on the floor, and low shelves with arrangements of Ikebana, fruits, and raku ceramics made by his friend James Whitney. A few choice examples of Belson’s art were discreetly displayed. Belson had blocked up most all the windows, but preserved two sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay and the Oakland Bay bridge, and beyond that the rolling hills of Berkeley and the East Bay. This panorama was a constant drama of fog, clouds, and celestial sun- and moonlight. The artist always said this view was a major influence on his work.

Via Ancienne Belgique:

An ode to Harry Smith’s ‘Anthology of American Folk Music’

This will be the first solo exhibition of artist, experimental filmmaker, and groundbreaking music ethnologist Harry Smith (1923–1991), whose compendium of song recordings, the Anthology of American Folk Music, laid the groundwork for the popularization of folk music in the 1960s. This exhibition introduces Smith’s life and work within a museum setting for the first time and includes paintings, drawings, experimental films, designs, and examples of Smith’s collecting alongside his historic folk music collection. Seen throughout this hybrid display of art and ephemera are signs of the esoteric, fantastic, and alternative cosmologies basic to Smith’s view of culture. The exhibition proposes new ways to experience diverse strains of 20th-century American cultural histories.