Malcolm Mobutu Smith is Associate professor of Ceramic Art at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He earned his MFA degree from the New York College of ceramics at Alfred University in 1996. As an undergraduate, he studied at both the Kansas City Art Institute and Penn State University where he received his BFA in ceramics in 1994. Smith’s professional activities include workshops, lecturers and residencies including visits to Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts in Maine, The Robert McNamara Foundation and an educational exchange tour in China in conjunction with West Virginia University. He has presented numerous workshops and lectures at university and art centers across the country. His works are represented in numerous private and public collections including FuLed International Ceramic Art Museum, Beijing, China, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, The Haan Museum and Indiana State Museum.

Smith’s works, both ceramic and drawing, are guided by improvisations that fluctuate between volumetric forms with graphic flatness. His vessels are inspired by the intersections graffiti art, comic books and playful organic abstraction. Generally, his ceramics forms rely on wheel-thrown and hand-built elements, most commonly presented as abstractions of cups, bottles, and vases. In this making practice he merges these forms with his passion for Hip Hop and Jazz as locations for invention and the unexpected. His decorative objects operate as signifiers of an acculturation to aesthetic things reflecting our desires and imaginations. Motivated by these concerns and his own multi-faceted/multi- cultural background Smith’s research is further buoyed by identity politics, CAD/CAM, printmaking and drawing.