Through and Against Abstraction: Thinking Space with Smokehouse Associates

In 1969, the New York City-based collective Smokehouse Associates produced a series of abstract paintings and sculptures in the streets of East Harlem. Adorning the walls of brick buildings and nestled within vacant lots, these nonobjective, public artworks contained various permutations of both abstraction and space. Analysis of these terms in relation to form, politics, race, and urbanism shows how the group—comprised of artists William T. Williams, Melvin Edwards, and Guy Ciarcia—used abstraction to navigate their aesthetic commitments as artists and social investments defined by the decade’s struggles for racial justice. In Smokehouse’s work, abstraction and space are highly mutable entities to struggle with and against.