Fall 07
Vol. 12 No. 4

Glen Smith, a Health Department communications specialist supervisor, maps new projects in his head and then precedes straight to the canvas, cement, or computer without sketching a draft.

Story and photo by Dave Schafer

At the intersection of fate and circumstance, Glen Smith followed a fancy to the left. A right turn off Holcombe and onto North Braeswood meant following up on a job interview. Left meant pulling into the city’s Health & Human Services Department and convincing them they needed an artist.

“It’s a natural environment for art, since science, like art, is about observing and looking for patterns,” said Smith through his hairy face. He wears glasses slid just a bit down his nose.

At the door to the Health department, Smith met the head of the public health education division. Smith calls that serendipity, a word he uses a lot when describing his life and work. He also uses the words “connections” and “synthesis.”

That division head hired Smith 10 months later, in 1973. Smith, along with a photographer, then created a media center to produce the department’s visual information, from posters and slideshows warning about a new form of venereal disease – later named HIV – to pamphlets explaining the benefits of immunization shots. It was as though a new door had opened, bringing with it a new outlet for all the things Smith loved to do.

Time passed like a gentle wind blowing a discarded Hepatitis brochure down the street on its billowy currents, bringing with it new technology that let divisions produce their own materials. In 1991, Health phased out the six-person media center, keeping Smith to produce graphics. In the late 1990’s, he found a new outlet for his creativity: Using paint, wood, piping, stucco, rope, whatever seized his fancy, Smith created works of beauty, abstraction and education to soften the sterile white walls that dominate Health’s 35-40 facilities, giving them the feel of a highly paid doctor’s office.

“We have thousands of square feet of wall space and a captive audience of patients and visitors,” said Kathy Barton, Smith’s boss in the public affairs division. “As they wait or pass through our sites, we use that time as a teachable moment through art.”

“People have walls of resistance built up when they walk in. If we can make them a little more receptive subconsciously to what we’re telling them, why not?” Smith said.

“Glen’s projects convey health messages that are engaging and attractive,” Barton said. “They are mobile, interchangeable and culturally sensitive.”

He bent with the winds, learning new techniques and using new media, blending tools and methods in a single project, creating synthesis and novel concepts.

“The health environment has given me ideas I never would have thought of in an artistic sense,” he said while stroking a line of yellow paint onto a canvas with images of bound wrists and headshots representing Black History Month. “That’s kept it fun.”

Like a starving artist courting wealthy benefactors, Smith sells building managers, clinic managers, or directors on the needs and benefits of having a painting on this wall or slithering tailpipes hanging from that ceiling.

“You’re helping somebody who needs something.

They just don’t know that they need it,” he said, his eyebrows and nose pulling up, taking the skin in the middle of his face with them, scrunching it up around the nose. He does that often, but then, he’s a man of consistency. His work has it in an indefinable theme.

“I’m continuously looking for a need, but I haven’t done anything that doesn’t need to be done.”

“His 30-plus years with the department gives him a deep foundation in the messages we want to convey,”

Barton said. “There is no commercially available public health art that would complement the activities of each facility. Even if it were available, I doubt we could buy it in the variety, quality and quantity we need.”

“The wall doesn’t know if the art’s from a gallery,” Smith said.

Smith is happy to let the art, like his career, like his life, take him where it will, even outside of his preconceived, limiting notions.

“There has to be a tolerance of acceptance,” he said.

Smith aligns his minimalist images with the environment, repeating a building’s distinct qualities or relying on a connection to its purpose. As those winds of time blew though, they sometimes carried his art from one place to another or carried them completely out of view.

“You like to think your work will last forever, but that’s not the reality,” he said. “Artists are like short-order cooks.”

He’s accepted it as he’s accepted most other facts of his life, a good life. He’s made a living doing what he loves for more than 40 years, 34 with Health. He knows people who worked jobs they didn’t like because they were promised riches that would lead to happiness. Smith chose the happiness in the first place.

“I’m too selfish to make more money at the expense of not doing something I like.”

return to the top