Artist Database

Kimber Smith, born 1922 in Boston, was a celebrated abstract artist. He held his first exhibition in 1951 in which he jointly displayed works with the painter Joan Mitchell at The New Gallery. He held his first solo exhibition in 1954 and continued to exhibit throughout his life.

Smith lived and worked with an expatriate community of American painters in Paris, after which he moved back to New York in 1966. He taught at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio and later went on to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971. After his death in 1981, his work was exhibited at many major museums across the United States and Europe.

​Kimber ​Smith’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Dayton Art Institute; Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland; Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims and Reims, France.