Jack Smith - Exotic Drawings and Photographs

“The whole of western culture exudes the distinctive aroma of slowing frying mermaid filleted.”

- Jack Smith, letter to Jonas Mekas 1963

Jack Smith, 1932-1989, was a master of the exotic idiom, working in theatre, film, photography, graphic design, drawing, and slideshows. He was one of the path-finding pioneers of American post-war underground aesthetics. Every consecutive look at the work of Jack Smith increases in… Exoticism. Art that went from the heart to the hand without taking a detour via the brain, maybe that uncanny, toothsome and sublime art experience that is purely visceral is what exoticism actually is, or means.

“Jack Smith could spend hours readjusting some peripheral aspect of a pile of debris, puncturing long silences only with occasional cryptic non sequiturs about penguins or a startling piece of extremely bad nutritional advice.

- Gary Indiana

BOO-HOORAY exhibits both at home in New York City as well as internationally. We also stage collaborative exhibitions with the Hayward Gallery and Rough Trade in London, Tsutaya Daikanyama, Hysteric Glamour, and United Arrows in Tokyo, Galleri Operatingplace in Stockholm, Colette in Paris, PopMontreal in Montreal, Mishka Los Angeles, Printed Matter at both MOCA/LA and PS1/NYC, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the New York Public Library, the Grolier Club, and Milk Gallery in New York.

Boo-Hooray exhibitions have included shows featuring Larry Clark, The Velvet Underground, Ray Johnson, Afrika Bambaataa, Jonas Mekas, Ed Sanders, Linder Sterling and Jon Savage, Spencer Sweeney, Houston Rap, private press vinyl, Wallace Berman, anarcho-punk group Crass, Jason Polan, Jack Smith, cult-filmmaker Ed Wood, and Situationist Times editor Jacqueline de Jong.

The exhibitions are drawn from cultural archives that Boo-Hooray excavates, organizes, and places in institutions such as Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Cornell University’s Division of Rare Manuscript Collections, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.