Artist: Mark Addison Smith
Exhibition Title: You Look Like The Right Type: 15 Years
Exhibition Dates: October 26 - November 30, 2023
Opening Reception and Gallery Talk: October 26, 2023, 5:00 p.m.
Artist Biography
Mark Addison Smith is a queer artist whose design specialization is typographic storytelling: allowing illustrative text to convey a visual narrative through printed matter, artist's books, and site installations. With his on-going, text-based archive, You Look Like The Right Type, he has been illustrating snippets of overheard conversations every single day since 2008 and exhibiting the works as larger-scale conversations between strangers exchanging words on topics never spoken. You Look Like the Right Type has been featured in Deadline, Hyperallergic, I Love Typography, Print Magazine’s The Daily Heller, Queerty, MAGMA Brand Design’s Slanted Magazine, and in conversation with Debbie Millman for the very first episode of NYCxDESIGN's podcast, The Mic.
Permanent collections include Brooklyn Museum Artists' Books Collection, Center for Book Arts, Getty Research Institute Special Collections, Guggenheim Library Special Collections, Kinsey Institute, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Library of Congress Special Collections, MoMA Franklin Furnace, Smithsonian American Art and National Portrait Gallery Artists' Book Collection, Tate Library, and Watson Library at The Met. Solo exhibitions include The Bakery Atlanta (in co-presentation with Eyedrum Gallery) and Chicago’s Center on Halsted. Originally from Atlanta, he is an Associate Professor within the School of Design at DePaul University and holds an MFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Artist’s Statement
On November 23, 2008, in the downtown Chicago Loop while hurrying to catch the ‘L’ train, a young woman approached artist Mark Addison Smith and asked him for a cigarette. “I don’t smoke,” he said. She snapped her fingers, looked him up and down, and replied, "Ahhh, you look like the right type." Suddenly and strangely inspired by the exchange, Smith rushed home to illustrate their conversation and a daily practice was born: he has been drawing the words of others every day, ever since. The daily practice will celebrate fifteen years during the run of this exhibition, and Smith has amassed roughly 6,000+ drawings in an archive aptly titled You Look Like The Right Type.
By capturing and drawing actual words spoken by real people, Smith aspires to make permanent and concrete what would otherwise be temporary. When amassed as modular narratives, the black and white drawings engage in grayscale conversations with one another across age, gender, location, and time to become larger conversations between strangers who have never met or exchanged words. And the audience, as interlocutor, triangulates the conversation by reading what was once spoken and making their own non-linear associations between text, image, and the completion of what’s left unsaid.
For this fifteenth-anniversary exhibition, Smith has curated conversation clusters representing key months within his archive and has arranged the drawings as pages from a calendar, shifting emphasis on the cumulative, time-based rules of his archive. As such, the conversation juxtapositions are dictated by the additive days of each month, and the topics of discussion reflect the cultural zeitgeist happening within each sliver of time.