Mike Smoot currently lives in Southern Vermont and is a Professor of the Practice in Print and Paper at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. He completed Tamarind Institute’s Professional Printer Training Program in 2007 and has worked at a number of professional fine art print studios including Atelier Towson, The Experimental Print Institute, Tamarind Institute, and Landfall Press. He has taught or given lectures and demonstrations on printmaking at Towson University, Goucher College, East Carolina University, Southeast Missouri State University, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Georgia State University, Valdosta State University, UMass Amherst, Bennington College, Keene State College, and Smith College. In addition, he has worked with a number of art related community organizations. He believes printmaking’s potentials for sustained collaborative effort, the negotiation of difference, and collective creative action make it a worthwhile pursuit.
Statement
My work is made using enduring printmaking techniques along with contemporary technologies to articulate my interest in past, present, and future social-political-economic-ecological interactions, phenomena, and potentials. I am intrigued by systems and the ways in which we generate, organize, and reproduce information. My work is the result of a process of continual investigation into these structures and how they inform our values and actions. I am pessimistically hopeful.
