22 February 2022
Tony Smith Foundation and the MIT Press are pleased to announce their collaboration to publish eight books over the next six years on the work and legacy of artist Tony Smith (1912–1980).
Comprising the Tony Smith Catalogue Raisonné Project, these fully illustrated volumes will serve as comprehensive documentation of the depth and complexity of the American artist’s career while simultaneously positioning his oeuvre in dialogue with contemporary discourses on art and culture.
About the Project
The Tony Smith Catalogue Raisonné, a four-volume publication, will put forth the comprehensive record of the artist’s bodies of work: sculpture, architecture, painting, and drawing. These four books will provide objective foundations for future study, interpretation, and analysis of the artist’s work and legacy. Additionally, Against Reason: Tony Smith and Other Modernisms, a four-book companion series, is conceived of as integrated collections of essays and commentary offering productive tension between canonical works by Smith and the views of leading scholars and artists. In many cases, these contributors will challenge ingrained ideologies on art, providing insights and renewed perspectives on parallel modernisms and other histories simultaneous to and within the larger context surrounding Tony Smith, his era and work, and beyond.
Published alongside the four volumes of the Smith catalogue raisonné, each book in the Against Reason series will similarly focus on the same overall body of work: sculpture, architecture, painting, and drawing. These companion books will feature commissioned essays, interviews, and visual contributions by practitioners working in a range of fields and disciplines, from mathematics and science to architecture, design, urban planning, literature, and visual art—all of which occupied Smith’s own wide-ranging practice.
The Against Reason series will appeal to readers interested in modern and contemporary art’s intersections with other disciplines since these books will offer counter art histories and alternative modernisms, revealing more expansive interpretations of the Smith legacy. This dialogue and tension between existing modernist history and contemporary art criticism will be attractive to many artists, educators, and arts professionals as society continues to grapple with systemic inequalities in institutional practices as well as entrenched narratives in the chronicling of art history.
Moreover, the project will seek to complicate and pluralize the concept of the catalogue raisonné itself, reconsidering the monolithic place this format traditionally holds in the writing of art history. The aim is to provide a more nuanced and historically rich lens through which the Tony Smith oeuvre and archive may be read today and by future generations. Primary audiences for the Tony Smith Catalogue Raisonné Project will be university, museum, and public libraries; curators and students; and art dealers, galleries, and collectors.
With its multifaceted form and scholarly approach, the eight-volume Tony Smith Catalogue Raisonné Project will push the boundaries of the typical, large-scale catalogue raisonné. It seeks to update and better reflect current methodologies for researching and writing modern and contemporary art histories. Through the perspectives of women, LGBTQ+ communities, and Black, Indigenous, and other peoples of color, the project offers an opportunity to look at societal and structural inequities that have come to define modernism and the writing of art history to date. In terms of design, the project’s compositional format will mirror the spirit of Tony Smith’s modular and generative modes of production.
The project’s first two books—Tony Smith Catalogue Raisonné: Sculpture and Against Reason: Tony Smith, Sculpture, and Other Modernisms—will be released in fall 2024, with seasonal releases thereafter for Architecture, Painting, and Drawing. The Tony Smith Catalogue Raisonné Project is directed by James Voorhies, Executive Director of the Tony Smith Foundation, New York, and designed by James Goggin and Shan James of Practice.