Patti Smith: A Donation to NOMA May 29, 2010

NOMA will present an exhibition of forty-five photographs by artist and musician Patti Smith, donated by the artist to the museum in 2009 and 2010. The display consists of forty-five silver prints made from negatives produced by the artist's antique Polaroid Land 250 camera. These prints will be augmented by a few original, but unique, Polaroid photographs, which are also part of Smith's generous donation to the museum. Patti Smith is an interdisciplinary artist of the highest order. She has excelled in the diverse fields of poetry, prose, music, drawing, film and photography. Her friendship and artistic relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was recently documented in her best-selling memoir 'Just Kids.'The source of inspiration for much of Patti Smith's poetry and music has often been key figures of French culture, including Arthur Rimbaud, Nicole Stephane, Jean Genet, Antonin Artaud and Rene Daumal, so we find many of the inspirational photographs Smith has taken derive from her frequent Parisian and French sojourns. Smith is especially inspired by the convergence of literary and photographic histories in 19th and 20th century France. If her own identity as an American artist of the late 20th century was that of proto-punk, it is one which parallels or pays homage to a similar defiant moment in cultural history: the underground art and literary movements of mid-to-late-19th century Paris.