the fol­low­ing was fea­tured on hearnet.com, Feb­ru­ary 1999

H.E.A.R. is hon­or­ing Win­ston Smith our long time friend and cre­ative artis­tic genius as Artist of the Month . Win­ston has gen­er­ously donated his tal­ents and art­work to H.E.A.R. for years. You can find his work on our T-shirts, cards, album cov­ers, posters. Win­ston is cur­rently show­ing at the Lawrence L. Hult­berg Fine Art Gallery in San Fran­cisco and cel­e­brat­ing the release of his new book, ” Art­Crime: The Mon­tage art of Win­ston Smith Vol­ume II. Thanks Winston!

Dossier of an Art-Criminal

Armed with razor blade and a fiendish wit, Win­ston Smith’s modus operandi since the 1970’s has been to kid­nap “inno­cent” images from the pages of vin­tage mag­a­zines and then to dia­bol­i­cally glue them into com­pro­mis­ing or polit­i­cally reveal­ing posi­tions in his sur­real col­lage land­scapes. “Truly sub­ver­sive art­work” wrote the SF Weekly in a review of Smith’s first book Act Like Nothing’s Wrong.“Per haps the most vibrant col­lage mae­stro since Max Ernst,” write pop­u­lar under­ground artist Frank Kozik who goes on to credit Win­ston with being“single-handedly respon­si­ble for an entire generation’s graphic style.

“Win­ston first came to infamy by way of his hard hit­ting polit­i­cal shock piece, Idol — a “bowl­ing tro­phy style” Jesus nailed to a cross of dol­lars that was used for the DEAD KENNEDYS’ album In God We Trust, Inc. That album, which was sub­se­quently 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. Two decades down the line, Winston’s style con­tin­ues to have polit­i­cal punch, but has also devel­oped an almost clas­si­cal sur­re­al­ism. His recent album cover for Tijuana No!‘s — Con­tra Rev­olu­cion Avenue has been called the col­lage equiv­a­lent of a cross between Picasso’s “Guer­nica” and the social real­ism of a Diego Rivera WPA-era mural.

Another fine exam­ple of his new style is Apoc­a­lypse Wow!, a full page spread com­mis­sioned by SPIN mag­a­zine that depicts a swirling end-of-the-world pop­u­lated with a mind-blowing array of whim­si­cal images from sword car­ry­ing angels to fly­ing poo­dles. Smith, once known only to DK fans and the punk under­ground cognoscenti, has been gain­ing pop­u­lar­ity in main­stream cul­ture. He’s had one-man shows in San Fran­cisco, Los Ange­les, New York, Lon­don and Rome. His debut book, Act Like Nothing’s Wrong, pub­lished in 1994 by Last Gasp of San Fran­cisco was favor­ably reviewed a wide vari­ety of regional and national mag­a­zines. His eigh­teen month sojourn as illus­tra­tor for SPIN magazine’s Top­spin polit­i­cal page (1995–96) fur­ther brought his work to national atten­tion as did his award for Best Cover Illus­tra­tion from the Asso­ci­a­tion of Alter­na­tive Newsweek­lies in 1997. And on the musi­cal front, his bizarre Insom­niac alum cover for the pop­u­lar neo-punk band GREEN DAY was indi­cated as a favorite in a 1996 read­ers poll in Rolling Stone Mag­a­zine. The grow­ing demand for Winston’s humor­ous and con­tro­ver­sial col­lage illus­tra­tions has prompted the release of his sec­ond book, Art­crime, and the pro­duc­tion of his first-ever series of col­lectible archival prints. The jumbo scale and fine qual­ity of this new print series hugely expands the already pow­er­ful visual impact of Winston’s work. Intri­cate col­lages, for­merly seen only in minia­ture on CD cov­ers or in newsprint, take on a whole new life when printed on archival water color paper and blown up to 3′ x 4′. We have arrived at the thresh­old of the twenty first cen­tury. It’s time to call off the art police. The work of mis­chie­vous art-criminal Win­ston Smith is finally being brought to full color justice.