Leon Polk Smith was a leading practitioner of the geometric, hard-edge abstraction popular in the mid-20th century. In 1968, during one of his most fertile periods, Smith created 16 lithographs at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. These lithographs, printed in one to three colors, echo the imagery of Smith’s contemporaneous large-scale paintings. The circular prints, for example, repeat the forms of Smith’s pioneering shaped canvases, which he began in the 1950s. Four other lithographs relate to a series, Correspondence, that the artist began in the 1960s in which he positioned a single shape irregularly within a boldly colored field; the green-blue and violet-red combinations seen here were two of his favored color combinations.

This exhibition of 15 prints from the Carter’s collection embraces both Smith’s American Indian heritage and the modernist abstraction of artists like Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Smith’s cross-cultural experiences inspired his devotion to geometric patterning and pure colors–he derived formal elements from the design and craft of native peoples and the avant-garde’s credo of non-representation and economy of expression.