Collection Guide
Collection Title:
Collection Number:
Get Items:
Smith (Harry) papers
2013.M.4
View entire collection guide
Search this collection
Table of contents
Title: Harry Smith papers
Date (inclusive): 1888-2010, bulk 1987-1990
Number: 2013.M.4
Creator/Collector:
Smith, Harry Everett, 1923-1991
Physical Description:
229 Linear Feet
(340 boxes, 4 flatfile folders)
Repository:
The Getty Research Institute
Special Collections
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles 90049-1688
Business Number: (310) 440-7390
Fax Number: (310) 440-7780
reference@getty.edu
URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10020/askref
(310) 440-7390
Metadata Rights:
Abstract: The archive was assembled after the death of Harry Smith, polymath filmmaker,
painter, and collector of American vernacular art, music, and artifacts. It contains correspondence from the last three years
of Smith's life, a
selection of Smith's manuscripts and art, most of his original films, his final audio project, Materials for the Study of
Religion and Culture in
the Lower East Side or Movies for Blind People, and a sizeable portion of his realia collections, including paper airplanes.
Request Materials: Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory
through the
catalog
record
for this collection. Click here for the
access policy .
Language: Collection material is in English .
Harry Smith, polymath filmmaker, painter, and collector of American vernacular art, music, and artifacts, was born on May
23, 1923 in Portland,
Oregon. Smith grew up in Washington state, moving between the small rural towns of Anacortes and Bellingham, in the center
of Pacific Northwest
Coast Indian territory. Smith's father, Robert James Smith, worked in the salmon industry successively as a marine engineer,
boat captain, and night
watchman. His mother, Mary Louise Hammond, taught on the Lummi Indian Reservation from 1925 to 1932.
Inspired by his mother's work on the Reservation, Smith became fascinated with local Native American cultures. By age 15,
Smith had recorded songs
and rituals of the Lummi, Salish and Swinomish peoples and compiled a dictionary of Puget Sound dialects. He also began collecting
early American
folk records. This was the beginning of a lifelong interest in documenting the art and language of diverse cultures on audio,
film, and canvas. In
1944, Smith took a brief trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, attended a Woody Guthrie concert and smoked marijuana for the
first time. This proved a
life-altering experience for him, and Smith decided soon after to leave his studies at the University of Washington to move
to San Francisco.
In the following two decades, Smith made the unique abstract experimental films that remain landmarks in the history of film.
He also compiled the
influential
Anthology of American Folk Music, a compendium of vernacular music that emanated from a range of
professional and non-professional, rural and urban musicians who recorded for local audiences. This collection of heart-wrenching
musical narratives
from "the old weird America" would become the foundation of the 1960s revolution in American folk and rock music.
Throughout the 1970s Smith focused on the four-screen film
Mahagonny, an imaginative reworking of the Kurt Weill
and Bertolt Brecht opera. The film is Smith's portrait of New York City, where he spent most of his adult life, otherwise
recording the city's
ambient sounds and collecting its detritus, always applying the anthropologist's method together with his keen sense of aesthetics
to gather items
of unexpected beauty and fascination.
An itinerate who flaunted normative social expectations, Smith lived most of his life in cheap New York hotels like The Breslin
or The Chelsea,
surrounded by his friends, acolytes, and collections. During the last few years, he moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he taught
at the Naropa
Institute at the instigation of his longtime friend and colleague Allen Ginsberg.
The Harry Smith Archives was created in 1992 after Smith's death. Committed to the location, preservation and presentation
of the work of artist
Harry Smith, it is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization registered in the State of New York since 1998. On December 2nd,
1991, five days after
Harry Smith died at the Chelsea Hotel, a group of Smith's colleagues gathered in the apartment of Raymond Foye. Attendees
included Allen Ginsberg,
Jonas Mekas, Joe Gross, Bill Breeze, Rani Singh, Deborah Freeman and others. The focus of the meeting was to discuss an immediate
plan to collect
and catalog Smith's remaining belongings and surmise about his continuing legacy.
In the years that followed, the Harry Smith Archives held annual memorials and screenings at Naropa Institute, St. Mark's
Poetry Project, Anthology
Film Archives, and other locations, with the goal of increasing awareness of Smith's work. The Archives also continued researching,
locating,
identifying and collecting Smith's art objects that had been dispersed to various private and public collections. The Archives
co-produced with
Smithsonian Folkways the 1997 reissue of the
Anthology of American Folk Music, with expanded notes and essays and
CD-ROM capability, exposing it to an entirely new audience. Originally issued by Folkways in 1952 as three volumes of two
LPs each, (a total of 84
tracks), it had been commercially unavailable for many years. The Archives also produced a series of concert events between
1999 and 2001. The first
concert, precipitated by
Meltdown Festival guest director Nick Cave, was a salute to the influential and
idiosyncratic
Anthology and many of Smith's other interests. Similar concerts followed in New York at St Ann's
Warehouse. This exploration continued with a two day symposium at the Getty Research Institute
Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde
in the American Vernacular
, which featured a concert "No Depression in Heaven" at the GRI along with two five-hour concerts at UCLA's
Royce Hall. The Harry Smith Project box set issued by Shout! Factory Records in 2006 is a multi-media record of those concerts.
The Old Weird America, a documentary by Rani Singh produced by the Harry Smith Archives, traced the history of the
Anthology from its initial compilation of 78 records to its release on Folkways Records in 1952, when it helped
to inspire the urban folk revival of the 1960s. The film also considered the
Anthology's continuing influence on
modern music.
Open for use by qualified researchers with the following exceptions: audio visual material is unavailable until reformatted;
Box 340 is
sealed.
Contact
Library Reproductions and
Permissions
.
Harry Smith papers, 1888-2010 (bulk 1987-1990), The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2013.M.4.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2013m4
Gift of the Harry Smith Archives. Acquired in 2013.
The collection was processed by Annette Leddy, Jan Bender, and Gary Echternacht in 2013, with Bender soley responsible for
rehousing and
processing the objects in Series VIII. Annette Leddy cataloged the collection, incorporating into the Biographical/Historical
notes some
sentences from Nancy Perloff and Rani Singh.
Four unopened, unused audio reels were deaccessioned from the collection in 2022.
Existence and Location of Copies
Selected digitized audio and video
recordings
from Series V., VI., and VII. are available to on-site readers and Getty staff.
Other Smith materials are held at the Smithsonian Folkways, the Anthology Film Archives, the Harry Smith Archives, and with
private collectors.
Recordings of GRI-sponsored Harry Smith events are also held in Getty Institutional Archives.
Scope and Content of Collection
The collection, assembled by the Harry Smith Archives after Smith's death, comprises most of what remained of Smith's work
after an itinerate life.
Correspondence in Series I is focused on the last few years of Smith's life, when he received mail from former students, acolytes,
and medical or
social service institutions. Series II contains interesting examples of Smith's poetry, photocopy collage art, and daily ramblings
in his journals,
though much of the written material is in the form of photocopies. Series III contains a large number of photographs of Smith
in a range of
activities, some by notable American photographers, and a number by Allen Ginsberg. Series IV contains biographical research,
clippings from several
decades about Smith's work, and about the posthumous performances of his work organized by the Harry Smith Archives, which
is also the primary focus
of the videos in Series VII.
Series V contains recordings by and about Smith, along with Smith's
Materials for the Study of Religion and Culture in the
Lower East Side or Movies for Blind People
, comprised of audio cassette recordings of collected sounds such as faucet drippings, wind,
bird calls, and traffic. Series VI contains most of the extant works in 16 mm film, and amply documents Smith's major film,
Mahagonny, which the Harry Smith Archives transferred to various formats. Smith's collections in Series VIII are the highlight of the
archive, where Smith's unique aesthetic strikingly emerges in the patterns that embrace multiple cultures, commercial and
handmade objects, and
paper ephemera of every imaginable kind.
The papers are arranged in eight series: Series I. Correspondence, 1974-1992, undated; Series II. Writings, research, and
artwork, circa
1920-1991, undated; Series III. Photographs, slides, and transparencies, 1940-2006, undated; Series IV. Printed matter, 1943-2008,
undated;
Series V. Audio recordings, 1964-2010, undated; Series VI. Film projects, 1947-2003; Series VII. Videos, 1964-2007; Series
VIII. Collections,
1888-circa 1990, undated.
Art -- Collectors and collecting -- United States
Art and music
Video recordings
Audiotapes
Photographs, Original
Motion pictures
Realia
Paper airplanes
Tarot
Folk art (traditional art)
Experimental films -- United States -- 20th century
Naropa Institute
Ginsberg, Allen, 1926-1997
Smith, Harry Everett, 1923-1991