Jason Powell-Smith’s Bay Area

December 2023, English, 7 x 10 in, 32 pages + insert, color, softcover
Design: Sming Sming Books
Co-published with NIAD Art Center!

Bay Area artist Jason Powell-Smith walks, bikes, rides BART and AC Transit, and occasionally will board an Amtrak train from Fremont where he lives, to NIAD Art Center in Richmond where he creates. He will ride BART to different stations just to see the station, or he jumps on a bus to San Francisco after being in the studio all day just because he likes to ride the bus in the city and watch life out the window. Jason takes in the Bay Area, and Jason Powell-Smith’s Bay Area is his Bay Area story. 

A proud Bay Area artist, sports fan, and news watcher, Powell-Smith’s prolific, multi-media art practice is informed by his journeys and experiences of the Bay. He places himself and others in the landscapes and experiences he witnesses. As a watcher, storyteller and commentator, he is non-invasive in his gathering of experience, yet wryly critical in his recreations. His work has developed over the years in different ways as his context changes and expands. His visual narrative is rendered through printmaking, photo editing from found photographs, textile design, painting, and drawing.

Jason’s VS Series is classic in its simplicity, complex in its humor and meaning. North VS South, Richmond VS Oakland, AC Transit VS MUNI, Powell-Smith acutely tackles many of the arenas in which our competitive nature battles, yet the battles are fully inclusive. Everyone is welcome to enter the wrestling ring, nothing is off limits in the ongoing VS battle. Jason’s work asks what team are you on? What would you rather? Who would you want in the Bay Area with you? Everyone is invited into his world and to Jason Powell-Smith’s Bay Area.