Multidisciplinary artist Lucien Smith, known for his abstract paintings and his non-profit artist support organization Serving the People, passed away on September 7 in New York. He was 37 years old.

Born in 1989 in Los Angeles, Smith was the son of African American artist Terrence Sanders-Smith and Filipina fashion designer Vivien Ramsay. Smith described his mixed heritage as central to an ambiguous sense of identity, compounded by frequent relocation throughout his schooling years. With this ambiguity permeating his practice, Smith remarked in a 2020 interview with Office Magazine, “I’m not making Black art, you know, because I’m not fully Black, and I’m not making Filipino art because I’m not fully Filipino. . . . I just don’t think it defines me.” 

In 2011, Smith received his BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. His two-person thesis show, titled “Imagined Nostalgia,” which explored childhood and constructed memories, drew immediate traction in the downtown scene, and gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn became an early patron. His first solo gallery show in the city, “Good Vibrations,” opened in 2012 at Bill Powers’s Half Gallery, presenting a series of modified electric guitar bodies transformed into wall art. 

Smith soon became known for his abstract Rain Paintings series (2011–13), created by spraying canvases with paint-filled fire extinguishers. The series was an instant commercial success and came to be seen as emblematic of “Zombie Formalism,” a term critic Walter Robinson coined to describe the work of a wave of young abstractionists. T: The New York Times Style Magazine described him a “wunderkind,” writing on his meteoric rise at such a young age in 2013.

That fast rise brought strain. Smith later said the volatility and demands of the market had left him disillusioned. “Art was about money everywhere I looked,” he told Hypebeast in 2020, “It was scary.” Around 2015, Smith made the decision to step back from the commercial gallery scene and left New York for Montauk. In 2016, he launched Serving the People, a collaborative nonprofit community designed to foster dialogue, connection, and support for young and unsigned artists. In 2024, Smith reopened FOOD, the avant-garde restaurant originally founded in 1971 by artists Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, and Gordon Matta-Clark, in an effort to revitalize New York’s artistic engagement and community.

Smith leaves behind a legacy defined by reinvention and experimentation, with his impact on the art scene in downtown New York deeply felt. Rohatyn, who gave him his earliest gallery exposure, remembers him as “a rare artist with charisma, talent, and the ability to build community.”

Harison Butler is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.