Artist Talk with Guy Richards Smit at Birdsong Farm – July 30th at 1 PM

Born and raised in New York City, Guy Richards Smit is a painter, video artist, performer, and musician whose work has appeared in the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Pompidou Center. Smit’s deeply observant work traverses a wide range of cultural forms to explore themes of narcissism, desire, power, and failure. Combining cultural and philosophical commentary with a fascination for pop music, rock operas, and comic books, Smit employs a keen eye and a mordant wit to explore everything from age to the memento mori of late medieval life, from sitcoms to gag cartoons and pop songs.

Smit was traumatized at the age of eight by a particularly dark Reginald Marsh cartoon that he found in his grandparent’s The New Yorker cartoon anthology. Since this encounter, the artist has been fascinated by the form, believing that gag cartoons should be viewed as culturally equal to paintings. During the pandemic lockdown, Smit began working on his own gag cartoons with the ultimate goal of creating paintings based on the most successful of these works. In February of 2022, The New Yorker began publishing his cartoons. An anthology of Smit’s cartoon work is scheduled to be published by Hunter’s Point Press in Autumn 2023.