The Leon Polk Smith Foundation is thrilled to announce Both Sides of the Line: Carmen Herrera & Leon Polk Smith, a groundbreaking exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art that unites two of the 20th century’s most visionary abstract artists.

Opening August 30, 2025, and running through January 4, 2026, this historic exhibition marks the first time the work of Carmen Herrera (1915-2022) and Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996) has been presented side-by-side at this scale—a remarkable milestone given their decades-long friendship and creative dialogue.

Friends, Neighbors, and Visionaries

Herrera and Smith were more than contemporaries; they were neighbors in New York City and close friends who shared a profound artistic vision. Through more than 45 works, including paintings, works on paper, and three-dimensional objects, Both Sides of the Line examines the dynamic relationship between Herrera’s crisp lines and bold colors and Smith’s sweeping curves and expansive forms.

Born in Cuba, Herrera navigated an art world that often marginalized her contributions, while Smith, a gay man born in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), similarly pushed against the boundaries of a system that never fully recognized his pioneering work. Their paths, distinct yet parallel, reveal a shared commitment to redefining the visual language of modern art.

A Long-Overdue Recognition

Despite creating work that prefigured movements like Minimalism and Color Field painting, both artists continually faced systemic barriers based on gender, race, and xenophobia—even as contemporaries like Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly gained international acclaim. This exhibition, organized by UMMA and curated by Dana Miller, offers new ways to understand their contributions to abstraction, identity, and the power of creative friendship.

The exhibition explores how these two artists’ perspectives intersect, diverge, and resonate—from iconic works in Herrera’s Blanco y Verde series to Smith’s Correspondence and Constellation series. Their innovative approaches to form, color, and space continue to influence contemporary art today.

Exhibition Details & Travel

Both Sides of the Line is free and open to the public at the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s Taubman I Gallery from August 30, 2025, through January 4, 2026. The exhibition will then travel to the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts, where it will be on view from February 21 through July 31, 2026.

A comprehensive 116-page exhibition catalog featuring essays by Dana Miller, Nadiah Rivera Fellah, and John Yau accompanies the exhibition and is available through the UMMA Shop.

Visiting Information

University of Michigan Museum of Art
525 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Free admission

For more information about the exhibition, visit UMMA’s website.

The Leon Polk Smith Foundation is pleased to announce Leon Polk Smith: Circle and Square, 1948-1987, a solo exhibition at Krakow Witkin Gallery in Boston that offers a comprehensive survey of Smith’s exploration of geometric form across four decades.

Running from September 13 through October 18, 2025, this exhibition marks an important milestone as Smith’s first solo show at the gallery and the first presentation to place his editioned prints in the context of his paintings, drawings, and collages.

A Lifetime of Dedicated Investigation

The exhibition traces Smith’s masterful investigation of circles, squares, and triangles from 1948 to 1987, revealing how he developed and refined his revolutionary approach to form-space equilibrium. As Smith himself described his breakthrough:

“What I was seeking through the 1940s was to find my outlet from this vertical/horizontal and to express the same thing that Mondrian had worked with, that is the form-space equilibrium, the interchangeability of form and space. I wanted to find a way of using that in a curvilinear manner, in curved lines, free forms. It looks so very simple. I always thought it looked as if an idiot could have done it overnight. But I was seven or eight years finding that.”

Pioneer of Hard-Edge Abstraction

Born in Oklahoma Territory to Cherokee immigrant parents, Smith’s path to becoming a pioneer of geometric abstraction was shaped by his early exposure to Native American art and culture. After studying at Columbia University’s Teachers College, he returned to New York City, where he had his first solo exhibition in 1941.

Over the next six decades, Smith sustained a growing reputation as an early and continuing innovator in reductive geometric abstraction and complex, multi-part shaped canvases. In the 1950s and ’60s, younger painters including Al Held, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman visited his studio, placing his work at a pivotal moment in the transition from gestural to hard-edge abstraction.

The Creative Process

Smith’s approach to painting was both intuitive and deeply considered. As he explained:

“I think that the proportion of the canvas comes first. I have a feeling that I want to do a canvas about a certain size, and I don’t know just what I am going to paint so I stretch it to size and hang it on the wall and sit down and look at it… And then the proportion, the size of the canvas often suggests a form. I will get up and draw this one line through the canvas which creates two forms, one on either side of the line, and while I am drawing this line, it seems that I am traveling many, many miles in space… and I begin to feel the tensions develop and the forces working on either side of this line.”

This exhibition showcases how Smith’s exploration of circles, squares, and their interrelationships in positive and negative space evolved throughout his career, demonstrating the visual and spatial tensions he so carefully orchestrated.

Exhibition Details

Leon Polk Smith: Circle and Square, 1948-1987
Krakow Witkin Gallery
September 13 – October 18, 2025

The Leon Polk Smith Foundation extends its gratitude to Krakow Witkin Gallery and Betsy Senior Fine Art for making this exhibition possible.

For more information, visit Krakow Witkin Gallery’s website.

The Leon Polk Smith exhibition features paintings, works on paper, and design. It includes selections from our own Leon Polk Smith Collection, numbering 756 works on paper. The Leon Polk Smith Foundation gifted this collection to us in 2015. The design objects come from our George R. Kravis II Collection of fine art and design, which we received in 2018. A select number of paintings will be borrowed from institutions and private collections.

OSU Museum of Art

Leon Polk Smith: Affinities in Art & Design
August 1, 2023 – January 27, 2024

Museum Haus Konstruktiv – Selnaustrasse 25, 8001 Zurich, Switzerland.

This solo exhibition is the first institutional retrospective in Europe of Leon Polk Smith in over twenty years, and the first ever in a Swiss museum. Shown on four floors and largely in chronological order, it combines paintings and works on paper from almost all creative phases of Smith’s career from the mid-1940s to the late 1980s.

The show is accompanied by a catalog published by Hatje Cantz in German and English, with texts by Sabine Schaschl (director of Museum Haus Konstruktiv), Brandon Taylor (professor emeritus for art history at the University of Southampton, UK), Margit Weinberg Staber ( Art publicist and first director of the Museum Haus Konstruktiv) and David M. Roche (director of the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona). The catalog will be available starting in April 2023.

Installation view, Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls, Brooklyn Museum, on view August 12, 2022 – August 6, 2023. (Photo: Danny Perez, Brooklyn Museum)

Brooklyn Abstractions: Four Artist, Four Walls
August 12, 2022 – August 6, 2023

This installation of works by Maya Hayuk, José Parlá, Kennedy Yanko, and the late Leon Polk Smith—four artists with strong connections to Brooklyn—creates a dynamic environment through four distinct, visually immersive experiences.