Smith’s 20-year long career as an architect (before beginning a second career as a sculptor at the age of 44) was highly influential for his later artistic practice, evidenced most directly in the large scale of his work and the building-like way his shapes interact with surrounding space. Smith preferred to call his pieces “presences,” suggesting that a viewer consider the work as a temporal and spatial experience. Painted black, his sculptures appear as silhouettes against the landscape. The artist constructed the original model for the sculpture Willy using parts of models from previous works, joining together paper tetrahedrons and octahedrons. “I tried to put the components together as arbitrarily as possible,” he explained. “I decided to see what would happen by adding elements without a scheme, purposely allowing it to be as uncontrolled and underdesigned as I could so that composition couldn’t come into it. After a time, things like that become determined by structural necessity…”(1) Though abstract, the sculpture resembles a crawling figure. The sculptor Paul Feely named the piece after a character from Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days who crawls across the stage. Smith’s other sculpture in the Pappajohn Sculpture Park, Marriage, is an archway made only of rectangular blocks. The shape recalls the post (vertical beam) and lintel (horizontal beam) used to construct doorways. Smith envisioned the visitor interacting with the work by walking through the archway; the title implies a metaphorical meaning for this sculpture as a doorway into a new stage of life.  

As a child, Smith was quarantined with tuberculosis and lived in a shed behind his family’s home for several years. He recalls building small models using medicine boxes, a formative experience that influenced his method for building sculptures from geometric components. Smith became affiliated with Minimalism, the artistic movement that evolved in the 1960s in which the meaning of an artwork was the experience of its shape and relationship to the viewer’s body. However, he was a generation older than most other Minimal artists. In 1937, Smith briefly trained at the New Bauhaus, a design school founded by artist László Moholy-Nagy at the University of Chicago. Smith soon left and took a job working for the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, first as a bricklayer and eventually as a construction site supervisor before starting his own architecture firm. These diverse influences inflect the unique vision that underpins his minimal, abstract forms. 

1) ”Willy, 1962,” Tony Smith Estate, http://www.tonysmithestate.com/artworks/sculpture/willy-1962