A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
SAIC faculty member Mark Addison Smith.

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Mark Addison Smith

Associate Professor

Contact

Personal Statement

Mark Addison Smith (he/him) 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 the first episode of NYCxDESIGN’s podcast, The Mic.

Bio

Education: MFA, 2008, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Visual Communication Design); BFA, 1999, Georgia State University (Film and Video). Collections: Artexte, Art Gallery of Ontario, Brooklyn Museum Artists’ Books Collection, Center for Book Arts, Cleveland Institute of Art Gund Memorial Library, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Design Museum of Chicago, Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, Getty Research Institute, Glasgow School of Art Special Collections, Guggenheim Museum Library and Archives, Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI) Artists’ Books Collection, Kinsey Institute, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Library of Congress Rare Books and Special Collections, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Research Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Watson Library, Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA), MoMA Franklin Furnace, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California (USC), Princeton Firestone Library Graphic Arts Collection, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Fleet Library Special Collections, Smithsonian American Art and National Portrait Gallery Library Artists’ Book Collection, Tate Library and Archives, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Arts Library, University of Dundee Museum Collections (abcD), V&A Museum National Art Library, Walker Art Center Archives and Library, Whitney Museum of American Art Library Special Collections, Yale Arts Library Special Collections. Exhibitions: Solo: The Bakery Atlanta (co-presentation with Eyedrum), Center on Halsted (Chicago’s LGBTQIA+ Community Center), McMaster Gallery (School of Visual Art and Design at the University of South Carolina), Valade Family Gallery (College for Creative Studies, CCS); Group: Center for Book Arts, Kinsey Institute, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA). Publications: Book chapters: Diversity and Design: Understanding Hidden Consequences (Routledge), Queering Translation, Translating the Queer (Routledge); Featured artwork: The Blue Notebook (Centre For Print Research, University of the West of England), Design School Confidential (Rockport), Queer Holdings: A Survey of the Leslie-Lohman Museum Collection (Hirmer Publishing), What Really Makes America Great (Andrews McMeel Publishing). Awards: Design Incubation Communication Design Educators Award (Scholarship: Creative Production), Penland School of Craft Residency, Research Foundation of The City University of New York (RFCUNY)
 

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

In this course students further develop their ability to undertake complex design problems involving typography and imagery to create meaningful solutions. Emphasized is the development of a point of view through a professional lens. It is the culmination of the beginning graphic design and intermediate graphic design course thread by taking a deeper exploration of visual communication design through the creation of systems, interventions, and speculations.

In this course, students will be exposed to the work of contemporary print and digital designers and studios such as Second Story, Studio A and Appetite Engineers. Readings, lectures and course work will address the role of applicable design theory and methodologies to create, develop and articulate a concept based on extensive research and strategic thinking for clear communication objectives

Coursework will vary as determined by the instructor, but will comprise a minimum of two projects. Basic parameters will be established by the instructor with final outcomes resulting in fully functional digital interactions and/or printed and possibly bound experiences. Assigned projects are user-centered, come with constraints, and have targeted audiences. Outcomes are open-ended physical experiences or digital interactions. Professional practice components are addressed, including making visual audits, writing project briefs, crafting strategies, presenting concepts, and thoroughly developing visual iterations and refinements.

Class Number

1860

Credits

3

Description

This critique seminar explores conceptual and structural configurations of personal and public cultural space. Constructing discourses about social, cultural and political phenomena, students derive content and voice to produce process artifacts that may range from a communications tool (a singular, interactive element) to a communications scenario (a system of urban or media elements). Two projects are given, each using a distinct methodology. Beginning with a focus on personal cultural space, students investigate the influence of mediated messages on the construction of identity using a generative matrix, pairing symbol systems with functions of communication. The semester continues with a focus on public cultural space, as students examine the dynamics of a chosen community using the process of dialogical mapping, developing diagrams that clarify rhetorical and metaphoric relationships within a community. Each methodology introduced in this seminar is inferred from linguistic analysis, intended to reveal and cultivate the complexities within each student's work.

Class Number

2079

Credits

3

Description

This critique seminar explores conceptual and structural configurations of personal and public cultural space. Constructing discourses about social, cultural and political phenomena, students derive content and voice to produce process artifacts that may range from a communications tool (a singular, interactive element) to a communications scenario (a system of urban or media elements). Two projects are given, each using a distinct methodology. Beginning with a focus on personal cultural space, students investigate the influence of mediated messages on the construction of identity using a generative matrix, pairing symbol systems with functions of communication. The semester continues with a focus on public cultural space, as students examine the dynamics of a chosen community using the process of dialogical mapping, developing diagrams that clarify rhetorical and metaphoric relationships within a community. Each methodology introduced in this seminar is inferred from linguistic analysis, intended to reveal and cultivate the complexities within each student's work.

Class Number

2086

Credits

3

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

2337

Credits

3 - 6

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

2377

Credits

3 - 6

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

2473

Credits

3 - 6