My process enables my art to question the potential of a photo to retain and tell the truth of one's past while achieving a texture that appears almost iridescent on the surfaces of the works.
Paul Anthony Smith (b. 1988, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica) is a Jamaica-born, New York-based artist who explores themes of post-diasporic identity, community, and cultural memory through his paintings and photography. In candid scenes of friends and family, he introduces an element of subjectivity and personal history to photographic documentation. Often with oil or spray paint, the artist inserts borders, fences, barriers, or masks onto images printed on Dibond sheets, emphasising the architectural and psychological impact of these oppressive forms. In 2012, Smith began incorporating a technique called “picotage,” in which he uses a retrofitted wooden needle to puncture and disrupt the surface of his inkjet prints, heightening depth and texture while further complicating our notions of truth and memory.
After studying ceramics at the Kansas City Art Institute, Smith moved to New York City in 2014, where he now lives and works. His recent Dreams Deferred series, which draws its inspiration and title from Langston Hughes’s seminal long-form poem, depicts the vacant lots and urban neighborhoods he encounters regularly in his life today. By overlaying shadowy fences on these familiar environments, he captures the collective disillusionment that pervaded the African American experience during the early 20th century and calls to mind social, cultural, and physical restrictions to access and equality. A collection of his large-scale picotage works that wrestle with these themes were featured in Passage , a solo exhibition at the Hyde Collection in Glen Falls, New York, in January 2024. The following summer , Smith realised his first public art installation, Melodies from a running spring , presented by Public Art Fund across bus shelters in New York, Chicago, and Boston, bringing his works into the public realm and engaging broad urban audiences.
