The artist Lucien Smith has died at 37, according to ARTnews. His death was confirmed by his longtime friend and gallerist Bill Powers, who told the publication, “Lucien lives in a wordless place inside us now.” No cause of death was given.
Smith was a fine artist, primarily working in painting and sculpture, and a restless creative spirit who dabbled in everything from NFTs to film and restaurants. He was an inescapable presence on the downtown social scene of the past 15 years. He stayed out late, possessed an impish sense of humor, and seemed to know everybody. He was also deeply thoughtful, a perceptive analyst of his own successes and failures, and, in recent years, devoted to finding new ways to support younger artists.
Smith’s career took off at a young age. While still an undergrad at Cooper Union, he found a patron: Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the curator and collector who runs the blue-chip gallery Salon 94. She bought a painting from his senior-thesis show in 2011 and became a supporter. “I didn’t really come from money,” Smith told the New York Times a few years later. “So I wanted my thesis show to grab as much attention as possible. Jeanne, she bought one of the first paintings I showed.” Smith grew up in Southern California, the child of a Filipino mother and Black father who bounced around a lot. “I’ve had to move to so many different schools because of my parents’ situation that I was thrown into so many different identities,” he told Office Magazine. “Going from public school to private school, playing sports, and being more art-oriented. I’ve always been a chameleon.”
In 2012, Powers hosted Smith’s first solo gallery show, “Good Vibrations,” at his space Half Gallery. “It was all appropriated guitar bodies which Lucien had then turned into wall sculpture by either painting or adorning them with bottle caps, glitter, tin foil, etc.,” Powers told Office in 2018. “Think John Armleder meets junkyard Duchamp.” Soon, Smith had the support of megawatt art dealers like David Zwirner and Alberto Mugrabi. Asked in 2013 whom he had his eye on, Mugrabi told Artsy, “I will be watching Lucien Smith because he brings me sunshine in the rain.”
Early in his career, Smith produced a series of works called the “Rain Paintings,” in which he used a fire extinguisher to create abstract fields of paint on large canvases. Many of these pieces, which initially sold in the low five figures, quickly ended up on the secondary auction market, where their prices climbed as high as $389,000. He became a poster boy for a new wave of speculative money washing into the art world. He benefited from and wrestled with his position as a “wunderkind,” as the New York Times dubbed him in 2013. In 2014, he bought a house in Montauk and started spending most of his time there. He studied storm patterns for inspiration. He played in bands and DJ’d. “I really want to stay out of the art world right now,” he told the Observer at the time. In 2015, he returned with another show at Half Gallery. “This is the time in my life when I’m maturing,” he told T Magazine. “Most of your favorite artists, if you ask them to show you work they made when they were 21, they would blush. The work I was making when I was 21 was selling for half a million.” He continued, “Work that I was making when I was 21 was on the cover of Sotheby’s catalogues. That pissed a lot of people off, but that’s an accomplishment.” He sometimes ruffled feathers. In 2015, Greenberg Rohatyn and the real-estate developer Keith Rubenstein threw a party in a South Bronx warehouse building that Smith decorated with sculptures he’d made of bullet-riddled cars and burning trash cans, sparking criticism from then–City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.
Smith’s creative ambitions often outstripped the traditions of the art world. In 2017, he launched Serving the People, a multidisciplinary platform that sought to branch out beyond the gallery system. He wanted to “nourish emerging talent in art, music, and film,” he said in an interview the following year. “Our goal is to provide an alternative platform for creative inquiry and experimentation. We want to help bring awareness to the unrefined, uncommercial, and create a market for it as well.” Serving the People hosted regular workshops and discussion groups for young creatives. Smith’s network of friends and collaborators extended beyond the world of blue-chip galleries to include fashion designers like Tremaine Emory, Heron Preston, and Virgil Abloh, who in 2018 hosted an exhibition of Smith’s paintings at his Soho flagship Off-White store.
In recent years, Smith continued exhibiting a steady stream of work. In 2024, I attended an opening of his work at Kapp Kapp gallery called “A Day Above Ground Is a Good One,” featuring a number of small sculptures and paintings; during the opening, Smith sat inside a small dog crate in the middle of the gallery floor, chatting with bemused visitors. In 2025, with nearly no restaurant experience, he opened FOOD, an homage to a restaurant of the same name founded in the 1970s by the legendary Soho artist Gordon Matta-Clark with the dancer and photographer Carol Goodden as a canteen for the neighborhood’s art scene. Smith wanted to offer something similar to the creatives working in and around Dimes Square. “This is my Soho,” Smith told this magazine, “and I’m very into it.” He was a ubiquitous presence at the restaurant, often working behind the counter or chatting with an endless parade of passing friends all evening on the street outside. The tiny restaurant’s line of stools was often occupied by Smith’s friends and peers from the art, fashion, and music scenes. Last week, FOOD updated its Instagram bio: “closed until further notice.”
In late August, Smith created a new round of Rain Paintings on a baseball field in Montauk. “Life has taken me full circle,” Smith told Artnet. “I think it is time to return to the process I was given.” The paintings were created for an upcoming exhibition titled “Delay of Game” at Tripoli Gallery, set to open on September 12.
Smith was excited about revisiting the practice that had put him on the map more than a decade earlier. “I’m doing something. Staging a comeback,” he texted me recently. “Art world is zzzzz. I think it’s time to make a move.”
