Heard Museum Explores One of the Great American Artists with New Grand Gallery Exhibition

Smith, Leon Polk

The Heard Museum is pleased to announce a new original exhibition, Leon Polk Smith: Hiding in Plain Sight, opening on Feb. 4, 2021. Leon Polk Smith, one of the great American artists of the 20th century, has been studied and celebrated through major exhibitions, publications and scholarship over many years – and yet, a significant source of inspiration and influence on his artistic production remains largely unexplored. Leon Polk Smith: Hiding in Plain Sight takes visitors on the journey of how a young Smith, influenced by American Indian culture in his native Oklahoma, became one of America’s most accomplished painters and a founding icon of midcentury modern art and design.

Leon Polk Smith was a renowned Modernist painter and one of the founders of the Hard-edge Painting Movement, an art form of the late 1950s and ’60s that emphasized geometric forms in bright colors. The exhibition will illustrate how Smith’s paintings connect with the colors and patterns of Southern Plains beadwork, ribbon work and painted hides. In the words of Leon Polk Smith, “I grew up in the Southwest, where the colors in nature were pure and rampant, and where my Indian neighbors and relatives used color to vibrate and shock.”

“Indian Territory was a place of creativity, lawlessness and invention. Leon Polk Smith has rewritten the narrative of place in the endless horizons, single lines and hard edges of his work,” says Joe Baker, guest curator of Leon Polk Smith: Hiding in Plain Sight.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring essays by heather ahtone (Choctaw/Chickasaw), chief curator at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City; Joe Baker (Enrolled Delaware), exhibition co-curator and director of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum; Dwanna McKay (Muscogee Creek), assistant professor of sociology and Indigenous studies at Colorado College; Diana Pardue, Heard Museum chief curator and exhibition co-curator; and Dana Whitney, former Richard DeMartini Family Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and current independent curator. The catalogue includes a statement by Patterson Sims, president of the Leon Polk Smith Foundation, and a foreword by Heard Museum Dickey Family Director and CEO David Roche.

Leon Polk Smith: Hiding in Plain Sight is on display from Feb. 4 to May 31, 2021, at the Heard Museum. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit here.