Ned Smyth
Shelter Island, NY
NED SMYTH
Sculptor Ned Smyth lives and works on Shelter Island, NY. Born in New York City in 1948, he was raised in New Jersey and Italy. He earned a degree in art from Kenyon College in Ohio. He was part of the Pattern and Decoration movement, beginning in the mid-70's which focused on patterning and decoration in fine art as a reaction to minimalism, which was championed by gallerist Holly Solomon, his art dealer.
Also known for his large-scale public works, Smyth has been shown in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the American Craft Museum all in New York, Guild Hall in East Hampton, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Denmark, P.S. 1, Long Island, and the Hirshhorn Museum of Art in Washington, D.C. For his profile, his solo exhibition focusing on photographs and sculptures of driftwood at Ille Arts in Amagansett was shot in December of 2018.
Ned Smyth - 12:07
“A stone could be, I don’t know, seven inches high and I love the form. But what I realized is I was interpreting something that was amazing and that I hadn’t touched. So I said, ‘How do I reproduce exactly what nature made rather than my interpretation of it?’”
“If the stones are monuments to matter, the twigs are monuments to life itself.”
