Lucien Smith, a Los Angeles-born, New York-based artist, has died at 37. After amassing major sales and when his market burst, Smith’s interests spilled beyond painting. He worked across film, fashion, music and design, founded a non-profit to support emerging artists, and eventually became a restaurateur.

The son of a fashion designer mother and an artist father, his senior show Imagined Nostalgia centred on childhood memories he had never experienced. Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn of Salon 94 bought one of the works. For a moment in the early 2010s, fresh out of Cooper Union, Smith watched the prices of his work rocket into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The New York Times called him a “wunderkind.” Forbes put him on its 30 Under 30 list twice. It was an extraordinary way to begin a career.

In 2012, at Morán Móran in Los Angeles, Smith presented seven Rain Paintings—made by loading fire extinguishers with acrylic paint and spraying them across canvas—and installed them alongside wood chips and portable stereos. The press release stated that the layered sound “produces a composition of white noise that audibly describes what the paintings optically communicate.” He painted the series during a period of disconnection from city life in rural upstate New York, inspired by Julian Schnabel’s open-air studio, Andy Warhol’s oxidation paintings, and Hans Hartung’s use of a garden sprayer to apply paint. That same year, Bill Powers of Half Gallery also showed his Rain Paintings and the following year Skarstedt Gallery.

In 2021, Parrish Art Museum invited him to revisit his Rain Paintings by exhibiting a suite from 2013, and his latest iteration, a new body of Rain Paintings, is slated to be exhibited in Delay of the Game at Tripoli Gallery opening on September 12.

About his art market rise (and fall) he said “…obviously I wouldn’t change anything now,” in an interview with i-d in 2020. Ultimately, however, he was not interested in being a New York art star. Further criticising the model that was set for him, lamenting that “sucking up to collectors and trying to sell for the highest prices. That stuff isn’t real. That’s not art.”

Around 2015, Smith severed ties with his galleries and moved to Montauk, invited his mother and brother to live with him, and slowed down. He began thinking about how to build something outside of the art market. In 2017, he founded Serving the People, a nonprofit and creative platform intended to give emerging artists opportunities and infrastructure beyond the usual commercial system. Smith has also been a strong advocate for resale royalties for artists.

In 2025 he opened FOOD in Chinatown, borrowing the name and spirit of the legendary downtown restaurant established by artists Tina Girouard, Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden in the 1970s. Smith imagined his restaurant as something closer to a living artwork; a messy, social, affordable place where artists could actually be together. It had that it factor—a buzzing community, a canteen to meet over food with new and old friends.

The first version of Lucien Smith was a sensation, but perhaps, the more interesting version was the person he became as he got out from underneath it.

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