MARK ADDISON SMITH is a queer artist whose design specialization is typographic storytelling: allowing illustrative text to convey a visual narrative through printed matter, artist books, and site installations.
With his on-going, text-based archive, You Look Like The Right Type, he has been illustrating snippets of overheard conversations every single day since 2008 and exhibiting the works—as larger-scale conversations between strangers exchanging words on topics never spoken—in spaces including A+D Gallery in Chicago, The Bakery Atlanta, Brooklyn Artists Gym, Co-Prosperty Sphere in Chicago, Foundry Art Centre, Hegyvidek Gallery in Budapest, and Kawaura Art Space in Japan.
You Look Like the Right Type has been featured in Deadline, Design Sponge, Goodtype, Hyperallergic, I Love Typography, Print, Queerty, and MAGMA Brand Design’s Slanted Magazine.
His most recent solo exhibition at McMaster Gallery within the School of Visual Art and Design at the University of South Carolina (2023) celebrated the fifteen-year anniversary of You Look Like The Right Type with an exhibition of large and small works-on-paper, artist’s books, and sketchbooks and running in tandem with the archive’s November 23rd anniversary date. An exhibition at The Bakery Atlanta (January 2019), co-presented by Atlanta's Eyedrum Gallery, celebrated the ten-year anniversary of You Look Like The Right Type with an exhibition of 365 works-on-paper. Other solo exhibitions include the Center on Halsted Gallery, Chicago, where he showcased the original 24 drawings from his Years Yet Yesterday drawing series to commemorate 2015 World AIDS Day.
His artist book, Years Yet Yesterday (2015), has been accessioned into over 80 permanent collections and library archives, including Brooklyn Museum Artists’ Books Collection, Center for Book Arts in New York, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Getty Research Institute, Guggenheim Museum Library and Archives, Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Library of Congress, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Research Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas J. Watson Library, MoMA Franklin Furnace, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California, Smithsonian American Art and National Portrait Gallery Library Artists’ Book Collection, Tate Library and Archives, V&A Museum National Art Library, Walker Art Center Archives and Library, Whitney Museum of American Art Frances Mulhall Achilles Library, and Yale Arts Library Special Collections.
Years Yet Yesterday is available for sale at Printed Matter (New York City), Boekie Woekie (Amsterdam), Women and Children First (Chicago), Chicago Design Museum, and The Bureau of General Services (BGSQD)—Queer Division.
Other permanent collections include The Kinsey Institute Art Collection, Emory University Rose Library, University of Michigan Library Artists’ Book Collection, Ringling College of Art & Design Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center, Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), James Branch Cabell Library Special Collections and Archives at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City.
Group exhibitions include Center for Book Arts, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, University of California San Diego, and The University of Northampton (UK).
Artist’s talks include American University, Fashion Institute of Technology, Lorraine University in Nancy, Manchester Metropolitan University, Rhode Island School of Design, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Tulane University, University of Nottingham, UK, and The Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna.
Recent chapter publications include Diversity and Design: Understanding Hidden Consequences (Routledge, 2015) and Queering Translation, Translating the Queer (Routledge, 2018). Pieces from his Queer Writing on the Bathroom Wall series were featured in Queer Holdings: A Survey of the Leslie-Lohman Museum Collection (Hirmer Publishing, 2019), spotlighting 200 works from the Museum's permanent collection of over 30,000 objects.
He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and is Associate Professor within the School of Design at DePaul University in Chicago.
