UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The College of Arts and Architecture’s School of Visual Arts will open its annual Anderson Lecture Series by welcoming visual artist and educator Malcolm Mobutu Smith on Wednesday, Sept. 23, at 11:30 a.m. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held at the Palmer Museum of Art.
The lecture series is supported by the John Muller Anderson endowment, which was named in honor of the professor emeritus who was an Evan Pugh research professor of philosophy and the first director of Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
Smith lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana, where he is professor of ceramic art and director of graduate studies in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University.
Guided by improvisationally merging volumetric form with graphic flatness, Smith’s work generally focuses on prompts from the history of vessels worldwide and pop culture derived imagery commonly landing as sculptures abstractly referring to cups, bottles and vases.
Through these choices, he said, he enjoys the collocation of object and image via wheel thrown and hand-built methods. Motivated by a passion for the multi-faceted cultural phenomena of Hip Hop and Jazz, his works are guided by the intersections of musical impulse, graffiti art and playful organic abstraction wherein, three-dimensional form acts as a vehicle for a direct means of drawing in space.
Smith’s works have been presented at The Luise Ross Gallery in New York City, and are held in numerous private and public collections, including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, FuLed International Ceramic Art Museum in Beijing, China, the Haan Museum, the Indiana State Museum and the New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan.