Talking Exhibitions and Art with Brian Smith

Brian at the South Portland Public Library exhibition opening on March 26, 2025. Image courtesy of Nick Eaton, Life In Focus Photography.

By Charlotte Van Voorhis

Brian Smith is a Portland-based artist who works in sculpture, painting, and drawing. He is inspired by queer ecological theory and what it offers in the context of climate change. Brian designed and curated the Envision Resilience: Designs for Living in a Changing Climate Exhibition Series in Portland and South Portland, which featured design student work alongside local Maine artists’ work.

Brian holds a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Maine College of Art and Design. His works have been exhibited across New England and in group exhibitions in Antwerp, Austin, and Brooklyn. He has been written about in publications including Boston Art Review, the Portland Press Herald, Maine Magazine, The Chart, Floorr, Divide, and Working Artists Magazine. Brian was recently a fellow at the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College and has completed artist residencies at Monson Arts and the Hewnoaks Artist Residency, where he currently serves as residency manager. Notably, Brian has received the Innovative Artist Grant, Maine Project Grant via SPACE gallery, Maine Arts Commission Springboard, and subsequent Project Grant. 

Charlotte Van Voorhis: Tell me a little bit about yourself, your background and how you got involved in art.

Brian Smith: I have done art my whole life, and I was fortunate that my parents really encouraged it and enabled it through classes and then I decided to go to art school at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Lately, my work deals with the connection to nature through a queer lens and I've been looking at life underwater as a potential solution to the rising waters and the inhabitable landscape of climate change. Included is that is envisioning a lot of, mercreatures, hybridized flora, underwater pansies, pulling from queer terminology, and just making work that's generally buoyant and optimistic about survival with climate change instead of the doom and gloom that we see on the news all the time.

That's exactly why we were excited to work with you! In a sentence or two, what is the driving ethos of your work and artistic expression? 

I’d say creating imaginable pathways to optimism and hope for people. When everything feels really dark and scary, we can acknowledge that that's all very real, but that we're also very resilient people and can figure it out. 

What made you want to get involved with the Envision Resilience Challenge? 

The thing that excites me the most about the Challenge is that we're doing the same thing, just through a very different language. For instance, my work kind of leans on fantasy and play to create these visual ideas of what the future may look like, which the students do as well, through design renderings. The main difference is that a lot of the students’ work feels more realistic without biological shifts in our anatomy, whereas my work includes merpeople, for example. Ultimately, I may use a different language, if you will, in my work, but the goal is the same. 

Brian speaking with a community member during the Portland Public Library exhibition opening weekend in February 2025. Image courtesy of Nick Eaton, Life In Focus Photography.

Could you describe your vision for the exhibition series and your process for seeing it come to fruition? 

Totally. It's been kind of ever-shifting and I think each of the exhibitions were so different, even if some of the material was reused from location to location. The vision was to bring in local artists alongside the student work–that felt really important as a way to meet people where they're at. Art is one of those things, much like music, that most everyone can appreciate in whatever capacity they have. I specifically wanted to work with illustrators for the Portland and South Portland Library exhibitions because illustrators create visual stories of how we may adapt. Not to mention, their works are just so beautiful and draw on the idea of the picture books in both library settings. Both featured illustrators used their images to reinforce the hopeful message behind the student designs. 

Could you tell us a little bit more about the local artists featured in the Portland and South Portland Public Library shows, Lin Snow and Pame Chévez Zendejas? 

Yes, I have followed their careers for years and have seen them go through changes and exciting new leaps. Lin's connection to nature is really present in their work, and their ability to work with color is very aligned with the way that nature works with color. They use a lot of muted or desaturated tones together that make very vibrant images. I'm in awe of Lin’s color use. I was so inspired when I saw the piece that we used in the Portland Public Library for the first time. 

Likewise, I had been following Pame’s career for a while and seeing what she's been up to, like the murals she’s created. Pame likes to character build, and so for the South Portland Public Library exhibition, her work focuses on this character of an ocean protector. She additionally includes all these other elements, like whales and seaweed, but the idea is that this person is connected to nature and able to protect her. 

How did the Portland and South Portland Public Library exhibitions differ from the SPACE Gallery exhibition vision? 

Brian (center, right) with the SPACE Gallery exhibit featured artists (L-R): Ben Spalding, Haley Nannig, Ian Ellis, POSEY (aka Pamela Moulton) and Michel Droge (not pictured: Lakotah Sanborn and Jordan Carey). Image courtesy of Nick Eaton, Life In Focus Photography.

As an art gallery, SPACE was geared more towards the visual arts. There were seven artists had work displayed amongst the design work from the 2024 Envision Resilience Challenge. I was interested in pulling out these moments where the designers sunk their teeth into something extracurricular within the projects. So, for example, Allyson Gibson from Professor Michael Luegering’s class at the University of Virginia made these “Plant Hero” cards with beautiful illustrations. Or like Sam Rimm-Kaufman from Professor Anne Weber’s class at Cornell University, who sketched the “Meet the South Portland Neighbors” panel. For SPACE, the exhibit had these kinds of forward-looking student pieces in conversation with the local artists’ optimistic artful futures as well.

How did immersing yourself into the design process with the Envision Resilience students impact your thinking for the exhibition series? 

I knew how official and professional and rigorous this program is but seeing all these students come out to do site visits, hearing about the places that they want to focus on and the fun things that they're doing like kayaking out in the bay, really cemented to me the caliber at which this program works. I also was really amazed at how quickly they honed in on their specific interests, while keeping their class’ shared care.

What role do you see art having in communicating difficult topics, like climate change? 

I think art is a means to access these difficult conversations. You can make a sculpture out of trash and raise awareness about pollution in a more digestible way than a 15-minute news story. Ultimately, art equals culture in many ways, and if culture is not oriented around these issues, it’s such a disservice. There's also this struggle around eco-anxiety, where we hear, for example, about the tons of carbon emissions released into the atmosphere every day, but that means nothing to most people because we don't know what a ton of carbon emissions looks like. And so, art offers a tactile way to address this disconnect and provide another entryway to think about these issues. 

What were some of the biggest takeaways that you learned from working on this project?

One takeaway is that people really care about what's going on not only globally but also locally. We have these eight schools coming together from different places, numerous Envision Resilience and Remain staff coming together, all the advisors and the local community coming together to offer input; everyone cares deeply about these issues. After mounting the shows,  I've seen people stop and really spend time with the designs and say, “This is so cool. I'm gonna come back and spend a lot of time here. This is important work.”

What, if anything, surprised you about working on this project?

I really appreciate the commitment to uplifting the arts that this organization has. Seeing artists be compensated fairly has been really awesome.

Who are some of your inspirations in the field of art? 

That's a great question. Some folks jump to mind: Agnes Questionmark is a performance artist/visual artist. When I first became aware of Agnes’s work, they were doing these underwater performances that were really amazing. They've done these performances as a merperson and other, more gruesome ones evoking that of alien surgeries. They're making work about what it means to be a human and their trans experience and it's really impactful, beautiful work. 

Additionally, I went to the Venice Biennale in 2019 and there was this performance called Sun & Sea Marina composed by Lina Lapelyte. It's an opera, and you go up on this balcony that surrounds the perimeter of this warehouse, look down and there’s a beach with normal-looking beachgoers. Then, one by one, they all start singing. The songs are seemingly mundane but speak towards the changing climate—for example, one beachgoer sings about how boring the coral reefs are now that they are bleached. It was so beautiful. 

That sounds amazing! My last question is, what are your plans for the future? 

I’m feeling excited to spend the summer in Portland, splitting time between the studio and hopefully the beach! I'm having a solo show this summer at Elizabeth Moss Galleries in Freeport from August through October, so I'm working on a new work for that. I've worked a lot with beads and I'm trying to impose image on sculpture through mosaics. And that brings me through the next couple of months!

More information about the Envision Resilience: Designs for Living in a Changing Climate Exhibition Series can be found here.