Malcolm Mobutu Smith

Malcolm Mobutu Smith is associate professor of ceramic art and director of graduate studies in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He earned his MFA degree from the New York College of ceramics at Alfred University in 1996. As an undergraduate, he studied at both the Kansas City Art Institute and Penn State University where he received his BFA in ceramics in 1994. Smith’s professional activities include workshops, lectures and residencies. He is on the boards of The Marks Project and well as Watershed Center of Ceramics in Maine.

His works are represented by the Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia and are also held in numerous private and public collections including, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Nora Eccles Museum, the Petrucci Family Foundation of African American Art, the Eskenazi Museum of Art, The Palmer Museum of Art and Indiana State Museum.

Smith’s works, ceramics and beyond, are guided by improvisations that merge volumetric form with graphic flatness.  His vessels are inspired by the intersections graffiti art, comic books, pottery anatomy and organic abstraction. Generally, his ceramics forms rely on wheel-thrown and hand-built elements, most commonly presented as abstractions of cups, bottles, and vases. In this practice he is fueled by passions for Hip Hop and Jazz as locations for invention and the unexpected. Motivated by these concerns and his own multi- cultural background, Smith’s work combines these references, mashing up cues from identity politics, drawing, printmaking and 3D printing arriving at the strange and new. His decorative objects operate as signifiers -aestheticized objects– reflecting his desires and imaginations.