The man who wouldn't be boxed in
Patterson Sims found us through the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation. He'd seen the work we did there, liked it, and got in touch about another mid-century American painter whose foundation he sits on. Patterson is kind of a big deal in the art world. He was the first curator ever put in charge of the Whitney's permanent collection, later ran education at MoMA and directed the Montclair Art Museum. The painter was Leon Polk Smith.
When Patterson hired us, Smith was not the name he is today. The younger artists he'd influenced were in every survey of postwar abstraction, while Smith himself sat just outside the frame, admired by curators and half-forgotten by everyone else. He had spent his whole career in exactly that spot, on purpose. Critics could never settle on what to call him. De Stijl, hard-edge, Color Field, Op, Minimalism: he moved through all of it and pledged allegiance to none.
Smith was big, bold, and geometric, both as a man and in the work. The identity needed to be the same.
Looking back
The man came first. Born in 1906 in Indian Territory, a year before Oklahoma became a state, Smith grew up on a hardscrabble homestead and never lost the build or the bluntness. He was physically powerful, closer to an athlete than the popular image of the starving painter, with a temper and a force of character that everyone who met him remembered. The work matched him. Some of it even ran on sports: in 1954 he was paging through a sporting-goods catalogue, noticed the seams on the baseballs and footballs, and a run of those curved, two-color canvases followed. He'd arrived at geometry early and stayed loyal to it for the rest of his life while movements rose and fell around him.
The logotype
We set it in Euclid Circular B. Euclid is named after the Greek mathematician who founded geometry. For a painter that loyal to geometry, a typeface named after its founder seemed appropriate. Within the family, Circular B is the pragmatic cut, the one that borrows the best from its siblings without committing to a single ideology. That is Smith exactly. He took what he wanted from Mondrian and left the theory on the table.
We broke the name onto three lines to get it as large as possible in a compact space. The stacked words, LEON over POLK over SMITH, lock into a clean square. Smith's whole method was building shapes out of other shapes, so the logotype does the same with his name.
The system and the site
As with most art foundations we work with, the rest of the identity was intentionally left very clean and simple. Lots of white space gives room for the art to stand out as the most important thing on the page.
Working with Patterson, we pulled representative paintings from every decade of Smith's career, so the site reads as a real arc rather than a highlight reel. For the biography we used an essay by Robert T. Buck, who directed the Brooklyn Museum and gave Smith his 1995 retrospective, American Painter. That connection meant something to us. Living and working in Brooklyn, we've seen a lot of great shows at the museum over the years, and thanks to Smith's bequest it holds a serious collection of his work that we've stood in front of many times.
The finished site does three jobs at once: a living archive of the work, a resource for researchers, and the foundation's public home.
A growing presence
Smith was already a significant figure when we started, a painter other artists and curators knew well. What's changed over the past decade is reach. More galleries represent him now, his work has been in a long run of museum shows, and the foundation has placed a lot of art into the right hands to keep his legacy active and funded. We'd like to think the brand, the website, and the years of design support since had something to do with that momentum.
2026 update: we're back at it again, redesigning the website to give the whole thing a refresh.
