Press Release for In Color

The Spotlight Gallery @ The ARTS presents Denny Smith - In Color

An exhibition of recent artworks by Allen Crittenden Smith will open at the Spotlight Gallery @ The ARTS in Corning on August 8. This marks the first solo exhibit for the artist in over three decades.

Smith states: "I was an art student cranked out of the late modernist school back in the 1970's. My teachers were second-generation abstract expressionists. Post-modernism was happening all around us, but it hadn't been validated yet."

"My strong work ethic drove me to support my family with a regular job. Now, at 60, I'm doing what I should have done at 25. I'm not a conceptualist. I make things - paintings and drawings."

Nine of these large watercolor paintings will be on display at the Spotlight Gallery of The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes, 32 West Market Street, Corning, from August 10 through September 8. A reception with the artist will be held on Friday, September 3 from 5 - 7 pm.

Of his work, Smith says: "For me, making art is a visceral experience and a meditation. Consciously deciding what the form will be, I allow my hand to follow a random path. In the end, the results are the routes of my synapses, evidential marks of my existence."

Allen C. Smith (his friends know him as Denny) is an artist living and working in Elmira, New York. Recent exhibitions include the 2009 Rochester-Finger Lakes Biennial, awards at the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira and State of the Art Gallery in Ithaca, and group shows at Exhibit A and 171 Cedar Arts Center in Corning and the Atrium Gallery in Troy, NY.

Smith received an Artists Crossroads grant through The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes for an art performance/mural project and was a featured performance artist at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's Gusto at the Gallery. Similar performances have been made for the Arnot Art Museum, the ARTS of the Southern Finger Lakes and the Corning Museum of Glass.

A participant in the New York Foundation for the Arts MARK professional development program in 2008, Smith trained as a MARK Consulting Artist in 2010. He is a graduate of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.