New York City Artist Lucien Smith Passes Away at 37
Smith graduated from Cooper Union in 2011, and almost immediately became a must-know name in NYC’s downtown art scene.
Black News 
New York artist Lucien Smith has passed away.
His friend Bill Powers, owner of Manhattan’s Half Gallery, confirmed the death of the 37-year-old multidisciplinary artist.
Smith graduated from Cooper Union in 2011, and almost immediately became a must-know name in NYC’s downtown art scene.
He even had the art buyers’ stamp of approval in 2013 when a piece he made for his ‘Imagined Nostalgia’ senior thesis that was originally sold for $100,000 went for $389,000. He was just 24 and thus beginning his Rain Paintings reign.
At the time, The New York Times’ T Magazine dubbed him a “wunderkind” who, despite being fresh-faced, had officially “arrived.”
Like many artists, his life experiences informed his art.
He was raised on the Lower East Side, but his parents, a musician and a fashion designer, moved him to LA during his formative teenage years. For college, he returned to the city he was born in and had to cope with how much it had changed since he left, which informed his art, most notably his short film A Clean Sweep.
“It’s very much supposed to be a love letter,” he told The T Magazine at the time. “It was really about trying to trick the viewer — and myself — into reminiscing about something that’s right in front of you and gaining an appreciation for the present day.”
But that same hype that was responsible for his meteoric rise —and making the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list twice — began to fade as his paintings’ values and his popularity waned.
As the figurehead of what was called Zombie Formalism.
Following what seemed like overnight success, Smith battled with some of the pitfalls of gaining notoriety so early,” his own studio writes. “It was during this period that Smith launched Serving the People, a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide young artists with opportunity and support.”
He’d even moved away from the noise of New York to the more serene Montauk to reset.
“I realized that everyone in the city is trying to be famous or something,” he told Ssense. “And I was subscribing to this idea of what a New York City artist was that was really pretentious and unhealthy. After the first four years of me showing, it became evident to me. I’m not interested in being a New York art star.”
His cause of death hasn’t been announced, but he was planning a comeback.
See social media’s response to the art phenom’s death below.
