Winston Smith

Punk Art Sur­re­al­ist Win­ston Smith, a mas­ter of “hand-carved” col­lage, has been craft­ing his thought-provoking art since the 1970’s. After being abroad for six years, Win­ston returned to Amer­ica and was aston­ished by the com­pla­cency the Amer­i­can pub­lic exhib­ited towards the cor­po­rate dom­i­na­tion in their soci­ety. Win­ston began tak­ing “safe” images from mag­a­zines and com­bin­ing them to cre­ate polit­i­cally charged works of art that chal­lenge the viewer to con­front incon­gruities and polit­i­cal para­doxes of mod­ern soci­ety.

Smith first became known (and later beloved) for his col­lab­o­ra­tions with punk leg­ends Dead Kennedys and his numer­ous album cov­ers, inserts and fly­ers for the band in their for­ma­tive years. His tech­nique of cut­ting out by hand and glu­ing each indi­vid­ual ele­ment has inspired a gen­er­a­tion of artists.

In 1981, his polit­i­cal shock piece, Idol brazenly adorned the Dead Kennedys album, In God We Trust, Inc. That album, banned in Eng­land and con­demned by the Amer­i­can reli­gious right, landed Smith and Dead Kennedys a per­ma­nent spot in the punk cul­ture Hall of Shame.

winstonsmith.com