About this Event
Join us in West Hollywood for a creative writing workshop (no experience needed! Just a curious mind.) led by bestselling author Jedidiah Jenkins within and inspired by the exhibition ‘Night Window. David Smith Spray Paintings, 1958 – 1964.’
In this workshop, participants will create poems out of manuals from everyday machines surrounded by David Smith’s Spray paintings. Guests will be encouraged to share their work at the end of the workshop.
This is a ticked event. Tickets are $25. Capacity for this event is limited, and registration is required to attend. All ticket sales are final and non-refundable.
About the exhibition
‘Night Window. David Smith Spray Paintings, 1958 – 1964’ is an exhibition devoted to Smith’s pioneering Sprays, seldom-seen two-dimensional works that embody the artist’s gift for daring, even startling innovations of form and color, space and time, in every medium he chose.
Though he initially trained as a painter at the Art Students League in New York, much of Smith’s education took place on the factory floors of automobile and locomotive plants, where he acquired a hands-on mastery of metal that would make him the first known American artist to weld steel into sculpture. Through those experiences he came to view fabricated metal parts as inherently abstract forms freed from function, waiting to be transfigured. That perspective would redefine the cultural and material possibilities of sculpture over his 33-year career.
The Sprays emerged unexpectedly from Smith’s sculpture-making. As he assembled metal components on whitewashed sections of his shop floor, his welding process left scorched silhouettes on the ground beneath. Recognizing new artistic possibility in these traces, he began arranging scraps of metal, paper and found materials on canvas, then coating the surface with commercial spray enamel—an industrial material with no precedent in fine art. He would often return to the compositions with white paint to heighten contrast and sharpen the interplay of elements.
About Jedidiah Jenkins
Jedidiah Jenkins is the New York Times bestselling author of ‘To Shake the Sleeping Self,’ ‘Like Streams to the Ocean,’ and ‘Mother, Nature.’ From cycling 14,000 miles to Patagonia to exploring the painful depths of family fracture to disconnecting in a remote off-grid shed for months, Jedidiah explores the scary things that give life meaning. His next book, ‘Go Quiet on the Mountain,’ is out February 2027. Jenkins’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, Orion, and he has been covered by National Geographic.
Images: Portrait of Jedidiah Jenkins. Photo: Collin Fatke; Installation view, ‘Night Window. David Smith Spray Paintings, 1958 – 1964,’ Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood, 17 September 2026 – 16 January 2027 © 2026 The Estate of David Smith / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo: Roger Edwards
Event venue & nearby stays
8980 Santa Monica Blvd, 8980 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, United States
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