Lenard Smith – Last Departure

With Last Departure, artist Lenard Smith experiments with handcrafted paper models, photographic documentation, and schematic drawings that capture the spirit of architecture, monuments, sculpture, and design. His photographs, which resemble structures th

This monograph explores the relationships between architecture and sculpture, as well as aspects of interdisciplinary art making, through a suite of photographs and schematic drawings alongside a dialogue between artist Lenard Smith and architect Anna Bokov.

Lenard Smith (b. 1975) is a first-generation Ghanaian American interdisciplinary artist and educator who lives and works in Los Angeles. Over the last fifteen years, he has developed a signature photographic language that combines an interest in architecture and assemblage sculpture. His research-based practice is increasingly informed by critical collaborations with architects, including Anna Bokov and Josep Lluís Matteo. His photographs have exhibited widely across the United States and abroad, and he has published six artist books. His work is included in the permanent collections of The Whitney and Lee Kaplan African American Visual Culture Collection at the Getty Research Institute, Light Work, and the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. He holds an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from Bard College. Smith is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at University of California, Riverside.

For Last Departure, artist Lenard Smith developed a process to create what he calls “proposals” for structures in the form of assemblage models, photographs, and preliminary sketches. The goal was to reimagine how built structures, if not physical space itself, could be conceived, visualized, and, ultimately, experienced.

The project considers architectural models as a design tool—and an intimate mode of exploration. Smith builds each sculpture by hand before taking an inquiry-based approach to photographically documenting them in his studio. That method intuitively asks: What happens when the angle from which the camera views the subject shifts? How does a spatial form transform because of those adjustments in perspective? The resulting monochromatic images resemble the still life genre, while also revealing the artist’s grounding in Surrealist strategies and visual reference points from African Brutalism.

By creating models to be looked at through photography, Smith’s work resonates with what remains of models created in the 1920s by VKhUTEMAS students, which he discovered in the school’s archives at the Getty Research Institute. He was fascinated with the documentation photos—and then stunned to learn that the models can only be experienced through those images as the original materials were destroyed. Last Departure works in the space of that absence, thinking through the relationships between architecture and photography, asking how the latter’s visuals present opportunities, if not innovations, for reconsidering how spatial forms can be perceived.

Last Departure expands conceptual understandings of VKhUTEMAS through a critical dialogue about its pedagogy with architect and historian Anna Bokov, PhD, the leading scholar of the school, presented alongside Smith’s art. The conversation demonstrates how architecture and art can inform one another in profound ways. The echoes of VKhUTEMAS as a utopian social project not only provide an inspiration for Last Departure, but also serve to activate Smith’s underlying concern for re-envisioning how spaces for everyday life, especially for communities of color, can be lived.

Last Departure broaches critical conversations that expand the scope of architecture as an interdisciplinary strategy for developing innovative ways of conceiving and ultimately realizing spaces. By exploring the generative relationships between architecture, sculpture, and photography, the project compels new considerations of how different spaces can be understood to be lived and experienced, particularly in the design phase. By focusing on models, not only as scaled versions of structures yet to be built, but, more importantly, as artistic invitations to experiment, the project implicitly reassesses one of the core tools of architectural design and pedagogy. That reconsideration resonates with (and is directly grounded in) a resurgent dialogue in the field about the VKhUTEMAS school and its avant-garde, radically democratic approach to bridging architecture and other disciplines.

For Smith, whose creative practice is rooted in an interdisciplinary approach, architecture and photography are fundamentally aligned. Likewise, his modes of presenting and communicating with the public—photography, exhibitions, publishing—are multifaceted and inform one another. In that spirit, the Last Departure publication itself reaches across disciplines and bridges audiences, appealing to readers and researchers interested in the intersections of art, architecture, environmental studies, design, urban history and planning, psychology, and politics.

Publisher: Perimeter Editions
Print Production: Wilco Art Books, Amersfoort, NL 

- Dimensions: 207 x 277 mm

- Inner: 112pp (88pp 120gsm on Munken Polar Rough;

24pp on 80gsm Recystar Nature)

- Cover/Binding: Coptic bind with stiff card dust-jacket

(300gsm Colorplan Black)

- Printing: LE-UV offset

Cover: 4 colour (white + tritone)