Lucien Smith, a multidisciplinary artist who garnered national acclaim in the 2010s, has died at 37.
ARTnews first reported news of the artist’s death. His friend, gallerist Bill Powers, confirmed Smith’s death, telling the outlet, “Lucien lives in a wordless place inside us now.”
A cause and place of death have not yet been disclosed.
Lucien Smith was born on April 15, 1989, in Los Angeles, the son of artist Terrence Sanders-Smith and fashion designer Vivien Ramsay. Growing up, he bounced around with his family from place to place, and Smith attended more than a dozen schools before ultimately graduating from Santa Monica High in 2007. He attended college at New York’s Cooper Union and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 2011.
His thesis project, “Imagined Nostalgia,” a reflection on false memories and our nostalgia for eras that we never experienced, caught the eye of New York dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who started showing Smith’s work at her gallery, Salon 94.
“When we met Lucien right after he graduated, in 2011, he was the hub and heart of a burgeoning downtown culture,” Rohatyn told ARTnews. “Bright, tender, filled with ideas and experimentation — a rare artist with charisma, talent, and the ability to build community. His Rain paintings — made with a fire extinguisher standing in for a rain machine, Lucien himself directing the spray — are now iconic. He made a batch in my backyard. As well, his Pie paintings, his Seeds, his Ark paintings and Scrap Metal. His most recent masterpiece was FOOD — together we worked with Max Lamb to build his banquets. We are deeply saddened, and will miss him terribly.”
After he graduated, Smith moved into a big red barn on a compound in Upstate New York, which he rented from film director James Ivory. The space doubled as a studio, and there he began his “Rain Paintings,” which would make him an overnight art sensation. So much so, the New York Times dubbed him an art market “wunderkind.”
In 2012, he had his first solo exhibit, “Good Vibrations,” at Bill Powers’ Half Gallery in New York. “It was all appropriated guitar bodies which Lucien had then turned into wall sculpture by either painting or adorning them with bottle caps, glitter, tin foil, etc,” Powers wrote in Office Magazine. “Think John Armleder meets junkyard Duchamp.”
In the early 2010s, Smith’s meteoric rise in the art world made him millions — his graduate painting based on Winnie the Pooh, titled “Hobbes, The Rain Man, and My Friend Barney / Under the Sycamore Tree” sold for a reported $389,000 at auction — but the success ultimately left him unmoored.
In 2014, he told Vanity Fair: “I took the thing [I] loved to do and I made it into what I do for a living. And that’s a really tricky thing. It’s perverse, and it becomes conflicting, because the thing that you used to use to escape reality is now just your reality.”
The same year, during a Tedx Talk at Columbia College, he described an extraordinary career that happened too fast, too young and led him astray spiritually. After a few years of glossy magazine profiles and raking in the big bucks, he was searching for meaning and unhappy with the “tragic artist” he met in the mirror.
He described an awakening after a bad trip with angel dust in which he woke up and started painting and realized that all his pain had vanished. “I realized then that this is why I do that. It’s for this feeling. This is my therapy. This is my drug,” he said. “All that other stuff … [i]t’s just baggage that other people attached to my dream. It was so easy to take on those things and to think that is what I wanted. But in this moment, I realized that it wasn’t about showing stuff on walls. It wasn’t about selling things. It wasn’t about magazine articles. … It was just about making things, making things with my hands. That’s the idea. That’s the dream. That’s what I committed to.”
In 2016, Smith launched Serving the People, a nonprofit organization with a mission to “nourish emerging talent in art, music and film.” And in 2017, he repurposed his mostly unused Los Angeles painting studio and launched a residency program for artists called Appointment Only, where he also hosted a series of art shows.
In 2025, he opened FOOD, a restaurant that paid homage to the 1970s restaurant opened by artists Gordon Matta-Clark, his then-partner Carol Goodden, and Tina Girouard; both restaurants catered to local artists.
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