Harry Smith was a musicologist, experimental filmmaker, and multi-disciplinary artist who explored universal patterns through the lens of an ethnographer and cultural anthropologist. He collected books, records, artifacts, and sound recordings using them as the basis of his works of art, as well as the raw materials for his anthropological and musicological research. His Anthology of American Folk Music was credited as triggering the folk music revival of the 1960s and in the past decades has become the primary and defining document in the alt-country/singer-songwriter movement.

Inspired by the bebop scene in San Francisco in the mid-1940’s, Smith moved to the Fillmore District, the city’s hub of jazz culture. During this time, Smith formed a close collaboration with fellow artist Jordan Belson. Belson was a painter, filmmaker, and commercial artist, and the two shared a number of interests including music, eastern mysticism, psychedelics, collage, and surrealism. Along with other “color music” artists such as Oskar Fischinger, Hy Hirsh, and Norman McLaren, Smith and Belson formed the core of the West Coast experimental cinema movement, which was showcased in the Art in Cinema series at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Smith’s films were part of their regular film programs and were occasionally shown with live jazz accompaniment. His early hand-painted films were complex and required years of intricate labor. He worked alone, using methods such as batiking and painting on 35mm frames or cutting out images and meticulously arranging frame by frame.

Throughout his career, Smith continued to collect, record, and study various forms of traditional and popular music, as well as artifacts and ephemera from different cultures. He compiled several anthologies of traditional music and his vast collection of recordings, films, and other materials is now housed at the Harry Smith Archive in New York City.

Smith’s work has been recognized for its density, complexity, and vision, and is considered a pioneer of the American avant-garde film movement.