Consulting Services
In close consultation with the client, Dr. Mark L. Smith will personally locate and procure appropriate art, create collection records, secure archival framing, and design and install the art works. Professional appraisal, documentation, archival reframing, and installation redesign is also available for extant collections.Exhibition organizing for art museums, alternative spaces, and galleries
In close consultation with the client, Dr. Mark L. Smith – as an independent curator – plans, researches, designs, and installs art exhibitions and provides appropriate literature, press releases, catalog essays, and gallery talks.Docent and trustee training
As an expert in contemporary printmaking, Dr. Mark L. Smith works with art museums and other art institutions and organizations to provide instruction in the printmaking processes that today’s artists use in their private studios and in collaborative shops.Creative workshops
In one- or two-day sessions with small groups of artists, executives, teachers, and other groups, Dr. Smith conducts hands-on workshops customized to the specific needs and desires of the participants.Art writing
Dr. Smith is available to research and write catalog essays, press releases, promotional copy, and other art literature for art museums, galleries, and other art institutions.Public speaking
A talented public speaker, Dr. Smith will deliver illustrated lectures for any type and size of group on a variety of subjects in 19th-century art, 20th-century art, and contemporary art. These can be tailored to specific needs or interests of the audience.Art critiques
Drawing on his experience as an artist, a college art teacher, and a curator, Dr. Mark L. Smith conducts thorough and rigorous critiques of artists’ work in individual or small-group sessions in locations arranged at the artists’ convenience.
Curatorial Portfolio
For over two decades, Dr. Smith has been helping corporations assemble first-class art collections, as well as curating exhibitions of contemporary art for museums and alternative spaces. Below are selected installation details from some of the collections and exhibitions.
Selected Corporate Collections & Exhibitions Curated by Mark L. Smith Art Consulting:
The Capital Group, San Antonio, Texas
Dubois Bryant Campbell & Schwartz, LLP Attorneys, Austin, Texas
Ronald MacDonald House, Austin, Texas
Slack & Davis, Attorneys at Law, Austin, Texas
The Watson Group, Austin, Texas
Tamarind Workshop & American Art of the Sixties, Guest Curator, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, planned for 2013
Advancing Tradition: 20 Years of Printmaking at Flatbed Press, Guest Curator, Austin Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, Nov. 27, 2010-Feb. 13, 2011
Kelly Fearing: Selections From a Life in Art, U. T. Performing Arts Center, Oct. 1-Jan. 15, 2009
Off the Edge: The Experimental Prints of Cynthia Brants, curator/organizer, scholarly essayist, fully illustrated cat. Flatbed World Headquarters Galleries, May 2-June 27 2009; touring
Texas Modern; The Rediscovery of Early Texas Modernism, Martin Museum of Art, Baylor University, Jan. 18-Mar. 30, 2007, “Minimal Remnant”, catalog essay
About The Principal
Biography
Mark L. Smith is a visual-arts professional with thirty-five years of experience in modern and contemporary art. He has forged a dual career in higher education and in private business. Equipped with a PhD in the history and criticism of art from the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Smith has served as an art department chairman, an associate dean in fine arts, and a teacher of art history and studio art.
After founding the Helm Fine Arts Center and Nancy Wilson Scanlan Gallery in Austin, Texas and writing the art column for the Austin Statesman, he co-founded in 1989 Flatbed Press Inc., a prestigious collaborative printmaking workshop in Austin where he functioned as the curator and production consultant until 2012. He has authored numerous articles and catalog essays, and curated significant exhibitions for major museums and alternative spaces, and juried innumerable competitive exhibitions. He has conducted creativity workshops, consulted with artists for career development, provided professional critiques, and developed corporate and private collections of art.
From his office in Indianapolis, Indiana, Dr. Smith provides a national clientele with a variety of professional visual-arts services.
Mark L. Smith Fine Art
In addition to his consulting services, Dr. Smith also makes available to collectors a large inventory of original etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts by contemporary artists who created limited editions in the collaborative studios of Flatbed Press in Austin, Texas.