NEW YORK, NY.- World-renowned American artist Tony Smith has been selected as the inaugural artist for the International Network of the Conservation of Contemporary Art – North America’s (INCCA-NA) Artist Research Project, which is designed to create up-to-date and freely available knowledge about an individual artist’s or collective’s body of work. The first part of this groundbreaking project launches today with an ambitious effort to encourage people to photograph, document, research, and geolocate the more than 100 public artworks made by Smith currently on view around the globe.

Rather than print this information, INCCA-NA is asking everyone around the world (The Crowd) to work together and complete the project by using two of the most-visited websites, Wikipedia and Flickr. Collating such well-researched articles in Wikipedia and complimenting this with current photographs in Flickr will dramatically increase awareness about these works and therefore allow for the continued advocacy for their proper care and maintenance.

To facilitate this project, INCCA-NA has partnered with increasingly important WikiProject Public Art, a Wikipedia-based resource, to create and house a comprehensive list of Smith’s artworks. This collaboration also provides resources for new and veteran Wikipedia editors to create individual Wikipedia articles about Smith’s public sculptures.

“We live in a world where every single one of the more than 500 television episodes of the Simpsons has a well-researched Wikipedia article devoted to it, but by comparison there is practically no information about many of the greatest artworks of the 20th century,” said Richard McCoy, a member of INCCA-NA’s Program Committee and founder of WikiProject Public Art. “This project can serve as a model and demonstrate the importance of documenting contemporary art while highlighting the significance of one of America’s most renowned artists.”

While Smith made many artworks in a variety of media, he is best known for his outdoor sculptures, which range from the small to monumental scale. However, there is no up-to-date and complete online inventory that identifies the current location of these works. “We are thrilled that this project is happening this year, which would have been Tony’s 100th Birthday (September 23 2012),” said Sarah Auld, Director of the Tony Smith Estate. “I’m particularly looking forward to seeing Wikipedia articles and images in Flickr of his artworks.”

INCCA-NA has built a project which relies on those that care about Tony Smith's artworks and who want to make a difference by helping to document an important artist's work in the world's most accessible and important online encyclopedia and on the most-used image sharing site. Get involved!

Tony Smith
Tony Smith (born 1912) made more than 50 large-scale sculptures between 1960 and his death in 1980. Their distinct black finish and geometric forms represent one of the supreme achievements in American sculpture, and his unique vision has proven enormously influential on subsequent generations. A contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists, many of whom were his close friends, Smith studied architecture, then began painting in the 1930s before turning to architecture fulltime in the 1940s. It was not until the late 1950s that he began to make sculpture, and he had his first one-person exhibition in 1966. That same year, Smith was included in Primary Structures, one of the most important exhibitions of the 1960s, at The Jewish Museum, New York. In 1998 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, mounted a major retrospective of Smith's work, including his architecture, painting, and sculpture. His work is included in most leading public collections, including those of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Tony Smith is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

For more information about contributing to the project, visit www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Public_art/TheArtistResearchProject/TonySmith