Mark Addison Smith

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's 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. You Look Like the Right Type has been featured in Deadline, Design Sponge, Goodtype, Hyperallergic, I Love Typography, Print Magazine’s The Daily Heller, Queerty, MAGMA Brand Design’s Slanted Magazine, and in conversation with Debbie Millman for the very first episode of NYCxDESIGN's podcast, The Mic. A solo exhibition at McMaster Gallery, within the School of Visual Art and Design at the University of South Carolina, celebrated the fifteen-year anniversary of You Look Like The Right Type with drawings, artist’s books, and sketchbooks from the archive's past fifteen years on display. A solo exhibition at The Bakery Atlanta, co-presented by Atlanta's Eyedrum Gallery, celebrated the ten-year anniversary of the series with an exhibition of 365 drawings. Other solo exhibitions include Chicago's Center on Halsted Gallery, where he showcased the original 24 drawings from his Years Yet Yesterday drawing series, sourced in language spoken by gay rights activist Larry Kramer, to commemorate World AIDS Day. Group exhibitions include Center for Book Arts in New York, Co-Prosperity in Chicago, Hegyvidék Gallery in Budapest, and Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA). His artist’s books have been accessioned into over 80 permanent collections and library archives, including Brooklyn Museum Artists’ Books Collection, 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 Menil Collection, 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, University of Dundee Museum Collections (abcD), 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. His type specimens and broadsides are included in the permanent collections at The Kinsey Institute, Emory University, Ringling College of Art and Design, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City. Artist’s talks include American University, Fashion Institute of Technology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Rhode Island School of Design, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University & College Designers Association (UCDA), University of Lorraine, University of Nottingham, and The Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna. Chapter publications include Diversity and Design: Understanding Hidden Consequences (Routledge) and Queering Translation, Translating the Queer (Routledge). Pieces from his Queer Writing on the Bathroom Wall series were featured in Queer Holdings: A Survey of the Leslie-Lohman Museum Collection (Hirmer), spotlighting 200 works from the Museum's permanent collection of over 30,000 objects and in tandem with their Expanded Visions exhibition. Prior to joining DePaul University's School of Design, he served as Associate Professor and Program Director for Design at The City College of New York (CUNY) in Manhattan. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).