Michael H. Smith, an artist, dealer, and curator who prized experimentation and was instrumental to helping develop the art scenes in Southern California in the 1970s and ’80s, died on October 31 in Santa Barbara. He was 80 years old. A cause was not given.
Smith first started in the LA art world by opening his eponymous gallery at 936 North La Cienega Boulevard in 1971. The gallery would close a few years later, and Smith would turn to private dealing and become a partner at the Jack Glenn Gallery, which had locations in Corona del Mar and San Diego.
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After a year-long stint as director of development and membership at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (today the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art), Smith would become the director of the Baxter Art Gallery at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). During his tenure from 1977 to 1982, he staged exhibitions for artists like Hans Haacke, Laddie John Dill, Richard Tuttle, Terry Allen, Berenice Abbott, and Siah Armajani, among others. (CalTech closed the Baxter Art Gallery in 1985, and its records were donated to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art the following year.)
His tastes were not necessarily well-received by the CalTech community, but his shows, which tended toward highlighting some of the decade’s most interesting artists, provided a space on the West Coast for them to show.
In a statement sent to ARTnews, LA dealer Craig Krull said, “Michael Smith’s contributions to the history of Southern California art are critically important. He is a key piece in the larger puzzle that is composed of people who cared about ideas and artistic explorations in this community. He is the kind a curator for whom I have admiration and respect, one who took chances instinctively, without reservation, believing in his own opinions and observations, and motivated to share them.”
Michael H. Smith was born on August 21, 1945, in Pasadena, California. He was a member of the first graduating class of the high school division of Pasadena’s Polytechnic School in 1962. While there he was an active athlete, lettering in football, basketball, baseball, and track. In the Los Angeles Times, sports reporter Jim Murray described Smith’s football acumen as such: “this is the first time I’ve ever seen a half back tear into the end zone and have the football follow him in on the vacuum.”
Smith first attended Menlo College in Atherton, California, where he also played football, before transferring to the University of Southern California. At USC, he completed undergraduate and graduate studies in art history, with a focus on museology.
With that background, Smith opened his gallery and then eventually began curating within an institutional context, ultimately leading the Baxter Art Gallery. After his departure from that university museum in 1982, Smith founded Business of Living for Artists, a consultancy that worked with artists like David Antin, Eleanor Antin, and Nathan Oliveira.
Later in the ’80s, he would go on to be a lecturer at the University of California, Irvine and mount exhibitions at the ARCO Center for the Visual Arts, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and the Laguna Beach Museum of Art. From 1996 to 1999, he worked at the Manné Gallery in Santa Barbara, where he mounted an exhibition around prints publisher Gemini G.E.L. that included John Baldessari, Philip Guston, David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, and others.
Smith was also an artist who primarily worked in conceptual photography. Krull, the dealer, exhibited some of Smith’s works at his gallery in Santa Monica, California, writing, “Michael was also a fine conceptual artist in league with compatriots such as Robert Cumming and Jerry McMillan, all of whom re-defined what a photograph could be and how it could act as a conceptual statement or conundrum.”
In 2022, Krull helped facilitate the Getty Research Institute’s acquisition of Smith’s papers, dated between 1959 to 2018; the collection measures 22.93 linear feet. Krull described the collection as including “vital letters and documents of his years leading Cal Tech’s Baxter Art Gallery through a period of seminal exhibitions.”
In his later years, Smith founded a nonprofit for marine research called Gray Whales Count, for which he would spend several months each year tracking the migration patterns of gray whales. Krull added, “The fact that he spent the last years of his life counting migrating whales from a perch overlooking the Pacific Ocean is testament to that natural flow with which he felt intrinsically entwined.”
