“Fragments of a Religion Forgotten: The Artwork of Harry Smith” is a landmark exhibition of the life and work of Harry Smith (1923–91). Smith was a painter, filmmaker, folklorist, and musicologist. Though his inventive output consists of work, movies, poetry, music, and sound recordings, he could also be greatest recognized for his compilation of recordings from the Nineteen Twenties and ’30s titled Anthology of American Folks Music, which has achieved cultlike standing amongst many musicians and listeners because it was first launched in 1952.

As a fervent collector and radical nonconformist, a lot of Smith’s work defies categorization, and far of it now not exists. His work typically consisted of in depth collections of neglected but revealing objects, corresponding to string figures and located paper airplanes, overlaying huge territories of disciplinary data and mediums. Making a coherent exhibition of Smith’s work presents many challenges. Co-curator of the exhibition, artist Carol Bove—who has lengthy been a steward of Smith’s work and has included it into her personal tasks—devised the exhibition’s formally progressive exhibition design.

“Fragments of a Religion Forgotten: The Artwork of Harry Smith” places the artist’s life on show alongside his artwork and collections. It follows him from an remoted Despair-era childhood within the Pacific Northwest—a time when he was immersed in ecstatic spiritual philosophies and Native American ceremony—to his counterculture youth of marijuana, peyote, and intellectualism in postwar Berkeley, California. The exhibition traces his path by the milieus of bebop and experimental cinema in San Francisco to his many years in New York, the place he was an important a part of town’s avant-garde fringe.

Keenly attuned to altering applied sciences, Harry Smith embraced innovation and used no matter was new and of the second. On the identical time, his lifelong curiosity in summary artwork, historic traditions, metaphysics, spiritualism, people artwork, and world music got here to the fore whilst he devised ingenious methods of amassing sounds and creating movies. These considerations make Smith’s work really feel more and more prescient as amassing and sharing become visible as inventive acts which are crucial for drawing that means from the glut of photos and juxtaposition of cultures we encounter at the moment.

at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge
till December 1, 2024