Smith’s father, Robert James, first brought the family to Bellingham, where he took a job at Pacific American Fisheries, a cannery founded by his own father shortly after the turn of the century. At the same time, Smith’s mother, Mary Louise, took a teaching position on the Lummi Indian reservation, where she would work from 1925 to 1932.
In the late 1930s, Robert Smith lost his job at Pacific American and the family relocated to Anacortes, where he became night watchman for another cannery. Eventually the Smiths would return to Bellingham in the 1940s, when Harry Smith was in high school.
Although the Smiths had characteristic Northwest jobs, they were far from the characteristic Northwest family. For a start they lived in seperate houses and both Robert and Mary were believers in the occult and self-proclaimed Pantheist Theosophists, and interested in the work of Madame Blavatsky.
Theosophists,were a nineteenth-century offshoot of Hindu and Buddhist teachings which held that the search for the Divine was an individual one. In that sense, Theosophists believed that all organized religion held some measure of truth, since each laid a pathway for the individual to become closer to God.
If the family’s spiritual beliefs didn’t set them apart from others, their living arrangements certainly did. Robert was frequently absent from home (sometimes due to work, sometimes to avoid family duties), and Mary was frequently in the company of other men. Harry Smith himself would remember many days in which he was plunked down at the local movie theater while Mary entertained her male friends. In fact, one of the men Mary may have seen (albeit before Harry was born) was the occultist/mystic Aleister Crowley who spent some time in the United States.
Although Mary may have been acquainted with Crowley, there is no evidence of any romantic relationship between the two. Nonetheless, later in life Harry Smith would sometimes claim that he was Crowley’s illegitimate son, one of many myths and exaggerations he was prone to tell.
Another was that Mary Louise was actually the Grand Duchess Anastasia who escaped the Russian Revolution in 1918 after being spirited through Siberia and sailing across the Bering Strait to Alaska.
Stemming in part from his mother’s work on the Lummi reservation, as a young man Harry Smith became interested in tribal languages and customs, in particular those of the Lummi, Swinomish, and Samish.
By age 15, in 1938, he was a frequent visitor amongst these tribes while working on a dictionary of local tribal dialects, it was remarkable that such a young boy could get access to these closed societies where white contact had been very limited.
He also recorded their songs and dances, the beginning of a lifelong fascination with capturing the language and art of others on audio, film, or canvas. Virtually all of Smith’s early Indian recordings are now lost, and the few surviving pieces were recorded with such crude equipment that they are now difficult to decipher.
Even before he was out of high school, Harry Smith had learned Kiowa sign language, spoke the Kwakiutl language, and was in regular correspondence with academics from the University of Washington’s newly founded anthropology department.
UW professor Melville Jacobs once noted that, at the mere age of 19, Harry Smith was “years ahead of his chronological age, in mental attainment” In 1943 his work was even featured in American Magazine; the article, reprinted in Darrin Daniel’s Harry Smith: Fragments of a Northwest Life, shows a bespectacled young Harry recording a Lummi spirit dance on a portable phonograph-recording machine.
The residents allowed the earnest boy to study their customs and take down genealogies, snap photographs, make sketches and paintings, and record songs, stories, activities and sacred events on a 78-rpm disc-cutting machine.
In the case of the Lummi, this was the first time they had been recorded by anyone. To this day, his time with the Native American nations remains a miraculous phenomenon; Smith and his like-minded peer Bill Hohn were given access to ceremonies even professional anthropologists had never witnessed. By all accounts, this relationship with Northwest Coast indigenous cultures was a respectful, creative collaboration.
It was also during his teenage years that Harry Smith began collecting, first Pacific Northwest Indian artifacts (many of which he donated to the Burke Museum at the University of Washington), then early American folk records.
However, in spite of his careful observation and recognized work as an anthropologist with the Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest, Smith was at the same time a notoriously unreliable source of information about his own life. The various myths he created and encouraged about his childhood and life before 1946 do little to render many of his claims to be credible.
Although Mary may have been acquainted with Aleister Crowley, there is no evidence of any romantic relationship between the two. Nonetheless, over the course of many years he claimed, variously: to be the mystic Aleister Crowley’s illegitimate son; that his mother was the “missing” Grand Duchess Anastasia who escaped the Russian Revolution in 1918 after being spirited through Siberia and sailing across the Bering Strait to Alaska that he smoked marijuana for the first time with Woodie Guthrie in the back of the Sun studios in Memphis, Tennessee, none of which were true, all just a few of the many myths and exaggerations he was prone to tell over the years
All his false biographical claims share a certain self-aggrandizing feature; when considered in this context,alongside his claim that he began making his first abstract films in 1939 when he was 16.
However what is indisputable is Smith’s obsessive appetite for objects that fascinated him, which over the years included the world's largest assortment of paper airplanes (later donated to the Smithsonian) paper airplanes, string art, Seminole Indian textiles, and Ukrainian Easter eggs, that would become a major part of his life..
Smith like his parents was also a Thelemite who had a lifelong interest in the occult and esoteric fields of knowledge, leading him to speak of his art in alchemical and cosmological terms.In the late Forties he began work with Charles Stansfeld Jones and Albert Handel. Smith also created a set of irregularly-shaped Tarot cards, one of which was adapted for the color Ordo Templi Orientis degree certificates, and used with several others for the paperback "Holy Books of Thelema" which Harry designed.
He also studied the Enochian system in depth, compiling the only known concordance of the Enochian language with the aid of Khem Caigan, his assistant throughout much of the 70s and early 80s. Harry was a familiar figure in the New York Ordo Templi Orientis, or O.T.O., from the late 1970s and, although he was never a member of the O.T.O, however in 1986 he was consecrated a bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica.
After graduating from high school, Harry Smith entered the University of Washington in 1943 to pursue his anthropology studies full-time. He had already done impressive work even before entering the University, but although his courses mirrored his personal interests at the time, he was eventually to abandon them.
In 1944 Smith took a short trip to California, where he was introduced to the Berkeley and San Francisco areas, and smoked marijuana for the first time. It was a visit that would change his life.
Convinced that he could not return to his studies, Smith dropped out of the University, did a brief stint on the Boeing assembly line at the tail end of World War II, and in 1947, moved to the Bay Area.
When Harry Smith returned to Washington in 1949 for his mother’s funeral, it would be his last known visit to the Pacific Northwest. Yet in later years he often spoke of his upbringing here and in his work frequently returned, in various ways, to the anthropological studies he began in Anacortes and Bellingham.
After settling near San Francisco, Smith took a job as an anthropologist’s assistant and began circulating amongst the area’s Bohemian set. Here he also began to flex his creative muscles, first by experimenting with film.
Smith was a slow worker, but eventually some of his films were presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the late 1940s as part of its Art in Cinema programs.This led to contact with other experimental filmmakers, including Jordan Belson and later Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage.
As a filmmaker, Harry Smith pioneered extravagant techniques in abstract animation, creating visual effects that were often painted or manipulated by hand directly on the celluloid. His experimental body of work commonly contains themes of mysticism, surrealism, and dada.
Smith’s early filmmaking style involved a painstaking, laborious process of primitive animation. His first film (today known as No. 1, A Strange Dream) took two years to complete and consisted of Smith drawing patterns of circles and rectangles directly onto the film stock, frame by frame, no camera, therefore, was required.
Silent, and running a little over two minutes, No. 1 told no formal story, offering instead a series of abstract colors and shapes. This was not necessarily a new form of filmmaking, similar types of abstract films had been done as far back as the 1920s), but it wasn’t a method particularly familiar to artists in the United States.
Smith’s made his next two films by batiking, a method in which he coated the filmstrip with multiple layers of dye and, using masking and scratching techniques, was able to depict his abstract shapes in more colorful and complex ways.
No. 2 -- A Message from the Sun also took two years to make (1946-1948), and was to be screened in synch with Dizzy Gillespie's recording “Guacha Guero.” No. 3- Interwoven (1947-1949) was much along the same lines.
Harry Smith would eventually graduate from hand-drawn animation to stop-action and collage in his films, but nonetheless these techniques kept him from being prolific. All of his films from the 1940s and 1950s were under 10 minutes in length, and frequently took several years to complete, particularly because he planned such complex visuals on little to no budget.
As a result, he had no choice but to plug away, little by little, to create his films, which he sometimes claimed were never really finished, they became what they were simply because he ran out of time, money, or interest.
The results, however, were groundbreaking. Harry Smith’s early films had much in common with the type of paintings he was beginning to make during this period, which used imagery, color, and collage and in the case of Smith’s later films, sound to create new sensory effects.
It was this characteristic of the artist’s work that brought Rani Signh, of the Harry Smith Archives, to call Smith a " 'proto-psychedelic ... who saw the world through a grand schema of alchemical connections that was this all-inclusive aesthetic -- the desire to show that everything connects -- that he felt best revealed the elemental structure of human existence” (quoted in “Harry Smith: Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular”).
On the West Coast, Harry Smith’s films got him noticed; on the East Coast it was his accomplishments in abstract painting. Smith, in fact, was always more interested in his painting than in his other artistic endeavors, his initial work in film was more of an effort to use the film stock as his canvas.
Although he had no formal training in art, Smith claimed to have known several artists during his boyhood who taught him some of their techniques. Smith applied similar artistic principles to both film and canvas.
He painted large freeform abstractions intended to visually represent notes, measures, beats and riffs of the beatnik era jazz music that inspired him. His painting Manteca (ca. 1950), for instance, was inspired by a Dizzy Gillespie song of the same name, with each brush stroke representing a specific note from the song.
Such was the “alchemical” characteristic of Smith’s work, painting a song, or creating screen images to enhance particular piece of music , that found him making unique connections between seemingly disparate concepts.
It was work like Manteca that helped Smith win a grant in the early 1950s through the help of Hilla Rebay, director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later renamed the Guggenheim Museum). The award prompted Smith to move to New York in 1951 with the intention of meeting Marcel Duchamp and remained there for most of the rest of his life.
He worked for Lionel Ziprin’s companies Inkweed Studios and Qor Corporation, conducted research for inventor and philosopher Arthur Young, and throughout his life continued collecting mountains of books, records, and a variety of different kinds of anthropological items, all the while also continuing to produce art, films, and recordings. Amazingly, all of his activities were conducted while regularly living an unstable and usually heavily intoxicated life, scrounging or asking for money wherever he could, including from surprisingly wealthy patrons such as Peggy Guggenheim and established organizations such as the Anthology Film Archives (and its predecessor the Film-Makers’ Cooperative), all the while living in various hotels throughout the city.
Harry Smith is not well remembered today as a painter, perhaps only because of the casual approach he took to his work. As is the case with many artists and writers, critical acclaim never pays the bills, and he was constantly in need of money. As a result, he would often sell or trade his artwork (or portions of his collections) to stay afloat, and depending on his growing drug and alcohol intake, would sometimes destroy his creations in fits of rage.
“Well, most of my paintings are lost,” Smith once told an interviewer, “but I assume that life in the universe will continue to the point that anything can be recreated. It’s only an illusion anyhow. There isn’t anything here except some kind of weak magnetic field”
Ironically, it was one of Harry Smith’s fundraising efforts that inadvertently led to what may have been his most important contribution to the arts. Reportedly short on cash in early 1952, Smith went to visit Folkways Records president Moses Asch in order to sell some of his early American folk records from the 1920s and 1930s.
Smith had long been a collector of early jazz and folk music 78s, scouring shops in Seattle, San Francisco, and New York, and occasionally advertising in record magazines for particularly hard-to-find discs.
He was also known to swoop in on shops that were going out of business, almost all his available cash to buy up rare selections at rock bottom prices. Material drives during World War II, as well, found thousands of records being abandoned in piles, so Smith was able to bolster his collection for free with selections that had been discarded. At any given point, Harry Smith’s vintage record collection numbered in the thousands, perhaps more.
Moses Asch was indeed interested in the collection, but had a much better idea: Instead of selling his records, Asch persuaded Smith to assemble a compilation album providing an overview of the genre and period, with liner notes and background material to be researched and written by Smith himself. Smith contracted with Folkways in May 1952 and threw himself into the project, which was eventually released as the three volume (six record) set Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways, 1952). Anthology concentrated on music made between 1927 and 1932, with 84 separate tracks by artists who had seemingly vanished from the American scene.
His inclusion of often highly unusual examples of Hillbilly Music, Bluegrass, African-American Blues, Ragtime, Gospel and Cajun music willfully disregarded the arbitrary boundaries of race and genres commonly imposed at the time. Harry’s song selection helped introduce the larger public to these (until then) forgotten artists, which included cuts from performers such as Buell Kazee, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Carter Family, Dock Boggs, and Mississippi John Hurt.
Interestingly, his method for selecting these tracks was unusual, it wasn’t always the best version of a song that Smith chose, but rather an early performance or a song in which he felt the singer brought something “extra” to the track that distinguished it from other versions.
Songs were selected to be ones that would be popular among musicologists, or possibly with people who would want to sing them or maybe improve the version, Smith would later remark.
Although never a big seller, this highly influential project’s importance cannot be overstated,it inspired a new generation of folk artists in the 1950s, including a rising young singer named Bob Dylan. Dylan, in fact, covered several tracks from Anthology on his 1961 self-titled debut album, and was still drawing on this material for albums released during the 1990s and this seminal collection was attributed by many to have brought about the folk music revival of the 60’s and even to have changed the entire direction of American popular, or vernacular music,while allowing the world to hear long-forgotten and buried blues, gospel, hillbilly and various folk musics.
Smith became an important figure in the Beat Generation scene in New York City, and his activities, such as his use of mind-altering substances and interest in esoteric spirituality, anticipated aspects of the Hippie movement. Smith’s position as an outsider to the art and experimental worlds in New York changed when he met the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1960; it was through Ginsberg that Jonas Mekas became aware of Smith’s films and began to program and promotion them as part of the New American Cinema.
Although much of Harry Smith’s later career found him concentrating on visual artwork, the world of music and recording never seemed far away. In the mid-1960s, Smith helped record and produced the first album by the Fugs, and began to experiment with ambient and spoken-word recordings, such as capturing works of Beat poetry on tape. For example, he worked with his friend Allen Ginsberg on recordings of the poet’s work.
Smith brought more to Folkways than his famous anthology. In the ’60s, he returned to anthropology, traveling to Oklahoma to record the Peyote-inspired music of the Kiowa Indians. Their songs were anthologized in 1973 in a boxed set of three LPS with the unwieldy title The Kiowa Peyote Meeting: Songs and Narratives by Members of a Tribe That Was Fundamental in Popularizing the Native American Church.
Smith had become acquainted with the Kiowa while serving as an advisor on the experimental film Chappaqua (1966), starring William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, which was shot in Anadarko, Oklahoma.
Smith was arrested on charges of public drunkenness in the middle of the shoot and eventually struck up a friendship with two Kiowa men who shared the same cell. While studying the culture of peyote, Smith freely partook of it. He also liked amphetamines, marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol. His favorite lunch: soup and a Black Russian. Doing his projects, he was often high or drunk. He was usually in terrible physical shape, eating junk, not taking care of himself at all.
He moved about like a vagrant, carrying what he could of his massive collections from place to place. No surprise, he spent some years at the Chelsea Hotel, befriending there Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Then he skipped out into the night, owing management $7,000. :
John Szwed the Grammy Award-winning music scholar and celebrated biographer and author of the brilliant 2023 book, “Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith,” the first comprehensive biography of this Harry Smith said “One of the mysteries of Harry’s life is how he was able to live in New York for thirty-six years, never held a job, almost never paid rent.”
Although Smith was on many accounts a royal pain in the ass, cranky and obnoxious, he got by with the aid of his friends. Jonas Mekas regularly lent him money and gave him an office to store his things, and Mekas repeatedly wrote Village Voice articles proclaiming Smith’s filmic genius.
In 1962 Harry Smith took a huge leap forward with his 12th film, commonly known today as Heaven and Earth Magic.
The loosely structured film follows a woman who has visions after receiving an anesthetic from her dentist. As noted by film historian Jamie Sexton, the setup provides Smith with a unique opportunity to incorporate his particular visual style, with specific references to such diverse sources as medical texts, Jewish mysticism, and the London sewer system, not to mention a recurring oval motif.
Viewed by many as Smith’s greatest film achievement, Heaven and Earth Magic was shot in black and white but designed to be shown using a special projector equipped with colored filters and masking slides to alter the screen visuals.
Harry Smith followed up Heaven and Earth Magic by getting investor backing for a new film version of The Wizard of Oz, although much of the budget was squandered and only a handful of scenes were ever completed.
Beginning in 1970, however, he embarked on an ambitious epic called Mahoganny, loosely based on the Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht dark, political, and satirical opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogonny. Described by Jamie Sexton as a picture in which “autobiographical film, animation, street symbols and images of nature are combined into a sensual, fluctuating flow,” the picture would occupy Smith’s creative endeavors for a full decade.
Mahagonny can best be described as abstract cinematic poetry that was made to be displayed with four separate 16 mm projectors onto a single screen or onto two billiard tables suspended over a boxing ring. Smith took years to dissect and study.
It was one of Smith’s most rarely screened films due to the complexity of its timing and sequencing. It took two very patient and skilled projectionists to carry out the complicated presentation. It was only screened six times in 1980 at the Anthology Film Archives. The time-consuming and heroic effort to restore the film was spearheaded by the Harry Smith Archives. It had to be painstakingly pieced together and synchronized following complex notes and ephemeral materials left behind by Smith.
Smith himself had high hopes for Mahogonny, as he boasted to an interviewer in 1972. "It's going to be so beautiful that no one can brush it aside," he stated. "It's going to be a miracle of motion pictures. It'll get people interested in motion pictures again and I'll have enough money to buy a studio and really make some spectacular things with, you know, enormous sets and beautiful actresses and handsome actors, gymnasts and things"
At nearly two and a half hours in length, Mahoganny has been viewed by many as a challenging film that did not live up to the earlier success of Heaven and Earth Magic, and although dividing the screen into separate images made for some interesting relationships, such moments seem few and far between. Its most noteworthy characteristic, in fact, may be that the picture shot largely in and around New York captures glimpses of the city throughout the 1970s.
All the actors in the film were friends of Harry’s that happened to be in the Chelsea Hotel. It is easy to identify Allen Ginsberg sitting in a chair, reading, while bathed in New York early-1970s sunlight, Mekas as a younger man, and a youthful and innocent-looking Patti Smith. These are epic cameos. The film also shows reoccurring faces who can perhaps be stand-ins for the characters in the Mahogonny opera:
Fatty the Bookkeeper, Trinity Moses, Leocadia Begbick, Bank AccountBilly, and Alaska Wolf Joe, or they represent numeric equations referencing The Large Glass.
Mahagonny can be watched while considering that Smith was perhaps constructing a precise mathematical and poetic analysis of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny that he believed to be the most important piece of music and cultural criticism of the twentieth century.
By the time he completed Mahoganny in 1980, Harry Smith’s careless lifestyle began to catch up with him. This slight, dishevelled, cantankerous genius with poor eyesight and with a lifelong relationship with alcohol, marijuana, whose income had always been negligible, who typically made ends meet only through the generosity of friends, had also spent most of his life in a series of cheap New York hotels.
Money came and went, and often Smith would use what little he could come across on his various collections, or on drugs or alcohol, with scant concern for rent, food, or to his own health and well-being. .
"I don’t know how I’ve supported myself," Smith told interviewer Gary Kenton in 1983. "It’s one of the things that gives me a belief in some creative energy beyond that of human hands ..." Smith was in such a state by the late 1980s that Allen Ginsberg intervened, in part to help a friend, but also to stop the constant requests for money.
Ginsberg helped secure a place for Smith at the The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, founded by Tibetan meditation master and teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. There he was anointed Shaman-in-Residence and treated with respect. At the Naropa Institute, Smith taught classes on alchemy, Native American cosmologies, and the rationality of namelessness, and was supported by a grant provided to him by the Grateful Dead organization. But Smith, incurably self-destructive, abandoned Boulder for a return to New York supposedly for a dentist who could pull his rotten teeth. The dangerously rotten teeth remained.
Despite his painting, filmmaking, or anthropological studies, it was his early contribution to music with Anthology of American Folk Music, that secured his legacy. Harry Smith earned a Lifetime Achievement Grammy at the 1991 ceremonies, an honor he received shortly before his death.
Smith was uneasy before the large industry crowd that evening, but remarked in his speech, "I’m glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music"
Anthology was reissued in 1997, this time with additional tracks that had been cut from the original 1952 release, and again received strong critical praise almost 50 years after its debut.
Shortly after receiving his Grammy, time finally caught up with the incredible Harry Smith. On November 27, 1991, at the age of 68, Smith died of heart failure at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, which for years had been his familiar haunt.
Harry Smith was neglected during his life but, as more details about his work emerged since his death he is now recognised as one of the great visionary outsiders of American art. Although his films and paintings have remained largely inaccessible to the public (in contrast to Anthology, which remains in circulation thanks to reissues), this has begun to change in the years since his death.
Five years after Smith's death, his friend the poet Paola Igliori began conducting intimate interviews with the filmmakers, musicians, poets, and artists who knew him best. The result, American Magus Harry Smith, offers a look not only into Smith's life and artistic practice, but also into his era and the informal economy of influence that operated during that time. It provides invaluable insight into the mind of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic polymaths.
The video. Includes clips from Smith's films, drawings, paintings, rare archive footage and interviews with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lionel Ziprin, Robert Frank, Jonas Mekas, John Cohen, James Wasserman, M. Henry Jones, Percy Heath, Grateful Dead, Patti Smith, DJ Spooky, Khem Caigan, Harvey Bialy and Rosebud Feliu-Pettet.
American Magus Harry Smith, Directed by Paola Igliori
Smith’s impact on American culture continues, and the total works of this talented and incredible artist are starting to undergo a major critical reevaluation, in part due to the efforts of Rani Singh, curator of the Harry Smith Archives alongside numerous books, including “Sounding for Harry Smith: Early Pacific Northwest Influences” by Bret Lunsford and the fine biography mentioned earlier by John Szwed, Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith that patches together, for the first time, the life of one of the twentieth century’s most overlooked cultural figures. It stands as a fine testemant to this outsider and visionary American Magus and icon.
Last year this also saw the first fully dedicated retrospective exhibition dedicated to his work, “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith,” that was on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 4 October 2023 through to 28 January 2022,This despite the curators were hampered by the fact that much of Harry’s work was lost over the years, for a variety of reasons.
The most famous example was a time in 1964 when a landlord threw all his possessions away during an eviction for lack of paying rent. In response, Harry spent several weeks going every day to the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island to try to find and salvage his items, but to no avail.
This episode has been identified as the moment when Smith’s mental health deteriorated badly and his subsequent drinking and other drug use became overtly and troublesomely problematic. This led to a habitually unstable state during which he was prone to destroying even more new works, film equipment, or other items such as books in fits of uncontrollable rage.
Though he rejected and resisted social norms, he is now finally becoming publicly remembered, and revered, He is celebrated as a neurodiverse polymathic genius whose knowledge was vast, who pursued his interests passionately, while keenly attuned to changing technology, Smith embraced innovation and used whatever was new and of the moment, whose impact on art, music and film resound from studies of place to beat improvisation.
Throughout his life, from his time recording the customs of Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Florida to his life in Greenwich Village in its heyday, Smith was consumed by an unceasing desire to create a unified theory of culture drawn from his lifelong interest in abstract art, ancient traditions, metaphysics, spiritualism, folk art, and world music he sought to find universal patterns.
Compiling a folk music anthology, collecting string figures from around the world, and conducting ethnographic research were some of the ways he attempted to identify common connections across people and cultures which make Smith's work feel increasingly prescient as collecting and sharing come into view as creative acts that are necessary for drawing meaning from the glut of images and juxtaposition of cultures we encounter every day. .
Despite being an insufferable and destructive eccentric who was unable to survive in regular society, or keep himself healthy or sober, he produced an exceedingly eclectic and powerful body of work, over the span of five decades: films, paintings, poetry, sound recordings, photographs, and collections of items, some of which are currently on display at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.
Even with much of his output disappearing, Smith’s impact on the world is nonetheless profound and continues to inspire reconsideration and interpretation.
Selected Websites
Harry Smith Archives:https://harrysmitharchives.com/
Anthology of American Folk Music: https://folkways.si.edu/anthology-of-american-folk-music/african-american-music-blues-old-time/music/album/smithsonian
Cosmic Scholar: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374282240/cosmicscholar
“Fragments of a Faith Forgotten”: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/harry-smith
“My Harry”: https://whitney.org/events/my-harry-smith
Selected Bibliography
Harry Smith: American Magus. Paola Igliori (Editor). Semiotext(e). (2022)
Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: America Changed Through Music. Ross Hair and Thomas Ruys Smith (Editors). Routledge. (2017). Including Kurt Gegenhuber, “Smith’s Amnesia Theater: ‘Moonshiner’s Dance’ in Minnesota.”
Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular. Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh (Editors). Getty Research Institute. (2010)
Harry Smith: Cosmographies, The Naropa Lectures. Raymond Foye (Editor). Naropa Institute. (2023)
Harry Smith: Think of the Self Speaking: Selected Interviews. Rani Singh (Editor), Allen Ginsberg (Introduction). Cityful Pr. (1998)
Sounding for Harry Smith: Early Pacific Northwest Influences. Bret Lunsford
John Szwed. Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith, the Filmmaker, Folklorist, and Mystic Who Transformed American Art. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. (2023)
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