I SPY TONY SMITH — Sharon Mark Cohen

While walking about in Washington, D.C, in late October, along with monuments and museums galore, we enjoyed the changing of the autumn leaves, and the many unique sculptures about town. None was so familiar as the Tony Smith fabrications. Tony Smith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Smith_(sculptor) raised his family in his hometown of South Orange, New Jersey.

The Smith family lived diagonally across the street from our South Orange house, which we bid on a month before Smith’s untimely death. When we moved to South Orange that spring of 1981, the Smith house was in estate litigation. Another neighbor invited us into his adjacent yard to show us one of Smith’s large sculptures, which remained on the property.

Each time I looked at one of the Tony Smith sculptures in D.C., I thought about the original piece we saw in his yard, and the painted steel fabrication of the one he called “Tau,” which I am privileged to visit any time at our local park, Meadowland Park, near the duck pond in South Orange. There are also Tony Smith sculptures I spied outside the Cleveland Art Museum and at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland when our son Judd was a student there.

When I met Smith’s daughters Kiki and Seton at Seton Hall University, two blocks from our house, I thought about their father’s sculptures randomly found everywhere. The women were at the college being interviewed about the house they grew up in, which as youngsters, they thought was haunted. I thought about when our neighbors who had invited us into their yard to see the Smith piece, once called from MoMA to tell us that there was a photograph of our house in Kiki’s book, which they discovered at an exhibit of her works.

Kiki Smith Prints, Books & Things is proudly displayed in our living room. On page 97, a photograph shows a young Kiki standing in the snow-covered triangle of grass in front of our house. Our daughter’s bedroom window is captured in the picture.

When I spy sculptures by Tony Smith, I drift into thought about his visitors on Stanley Road in South Orange and wonder whether these neighbors (meaning my husband and I), would have been part of the revelry. A generation earlier, I may have spied and even spoken with Smith’s close friends who were known to visit and party at his Stanley Road residence. Regulars Jackson Pollock and Tennessee Williams were in the mix of this avant-garde circle of friends. This leads me to ponder, just who are our neighbors?

Sharon at The Snake is Out by Tony Smith Washington, D.C. October 2019 (see description below)

Sharon’s husband Arnee at Moondog by Tony Smith Washington, D.C. October 2019 (see description below)

Sharon at Meadowland Park, corner of Mead Street and No. Ridgewood Road, South Orange, N.J. November 3, 2019

Street sign on the corner of Meadowland Park, South Orange where Tau by Tony Smith is located.