Leslie Smith III  is a contemporary African American visual artist. He currently lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin.

Life

Smith grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, in metropolitan Washington, D.C. and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland in 2007. He obtained a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut in 2009. He is currently an Associate Professor of Drawing and Painting at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Madison, Wisconsin.

Art

Leslie Smith III is an oil painter best known for his abstractions painted on shaped canvases. He engages in an expressionist-based practice, activating his canvases with bold color, gestural brushstrokes, and narratives that insinuate discord. Inspired by personal narrative and day-to-day interpersonal relationships, his paintings concentrate on employing abstraction to communicate the poetics of the human experience.

He is represented by Guido Maus, beta pictoris gallery / Maus Contemporary in Birmingham, AL,  and by Galerie Isabelle Gounod in Paris, France.