A 50-year retrospective is a profound threshold where the full sweep of a creative life unfolds at once.
Philip Smith: Magnetic Fields, the newest exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami (MOCA), presents the career span of Miami-based visual artist Philip Smith. Curated by art historian Robin Clark, who also named the show, the exhibition reveals a long arc of transformation, mysticism, and aesthetic devotion, inviting viewers into a uniquely layered journey across time and consciousness.
“This is the first time there’s what they call a survey of 50 years of work,” Smith said. “It starts with my first work in 1977 through 2025. The show is arranged loosely chronologically, but not meticulously so. Each room is a different experience – a different period of my life, a different period of work – but they’re all connected by this pictographic language, and there’s a linear narrative that goes through it all.”
(Photo by Oriel Tarridas)
Untitled 1983 Oil and Wax on canvas, 72 x 95.5 inch
Known for weaving deeply personal, often mystical elements into his work, Smith’s practice is shaped by a peculiar and compelling family history that imbues each painting with a sense of intentionality and healing energy, often guised in quixotic symbols or codes. Amid spirals and DNA strands appear telephones, sunglasses, and televisions. He is a provocateur who makes viewers want to connect the dots.
The show’s title, Magnetic Fields, evokes invisible forces – fields of energy, memory, and spirit – fields draw people in. Clark chose a fitting name for an exhibit rooted in the metaphysical.
(Photo by Oriol Tarridas)
Spin, 1998 Oil, cold wax on linen 53 x 62 inches (134.6 x 157.6)
“The work has always been interested in metaphysics and other dimensions,” Smith says. “It’s really chronicling my experiences dealing with other frequencies and energies.”
In the tradition of major retrospectives by artists like David Hockney and Faith Ringgold, Magnetic Fields offers not just an overview of decades but a cohesive narrative where spiritual inquiry, visual language, and the force of lived experience meet in a field of quiet magnetism.
Clark’s curatorial vision divides the show into six distinct gallery spaces: Pictures, Color, White, Black, Modern, and Energy.
(Photo by Oriol Tarridas)
Panel I, (1976) Oil pastel, pencil on paper 88 x 60 inches (223.5 x 152.4 cm)
The first room, Pictures, features Smith’s early conceptual photography from the Pictures Generation, along with his first painting from 1977. Next is Color, where Fields’ signature pictographic works emerge in vivid hues. The White and Black rooms introduce a sense of pause and interiority – what Clark describes as “places of retreat” – while the Black room also carries weighty allusions to mortality. The final gallery, Energy, offers a glimpse into the most recent pieces, where Smith’s lines break open into energetic abstraction. Together, these rooms trace a spiritual as well as artistic evolution, culminating in a space of vibration and transformation.
“They seem to be mostly about things in some kind of transition, either emerging or disappearing,” Clarke observed
Clark sees Smith’s process as a kind of ritual in itself.
“A lot of the paintings are made with oil paint mixed with wax,” she explained. “He doesn’t use a brush – he uses a screwdriver to draw into the wet mixture. It’s almost like drawing in cake batter. So, the image you see is drawn by removing lines to reveal what’s underneath.”
SHAPING THE ARTIST
(Photo by Oriol Tarridas)
Philip Smith
This perspective was shaped early in life by a markedly peculiar family life. Fields’ father, a high-society interior designer who once decorated the Haitian presidential palace and worked for Walt Disney, dramatically pivoted in the 1960s after declaring he could talk to the dead and heal the sick.
“Suddenly, our lives changed,” Smith recalled. “We became, from a kind of bohemian family, to lords, with people coming in and out of the house all hours of the day and night looking for healings. You don’t become an accountant after that.”
(Photo by Oriol Tarridas)
Phillip Smith
Smith’s 2008 memoir “Walking Through Walls” (Simon & Schuster), recounts these experiences, and they ripple through his art. The book has been optioned for television.
Such origins set Smith on a path toward visual metaphysics. His abstract works aim to move beyond traditional storytelling and into a space of energetic transmission.
“The work has always been interested in metaphysics and the idea of other dimensions,” said Smith. “It’s really my experience in dealing with these other dimensions and other frequencies and energies. And that’s really what’s behind the work.”
Did he inherit his father’s gift?
“I feel that I do my healing through the painting,” Smith said.
HEALING THROUGH PAINTING
(Photo by Oriol Tarridas)
Family at War I, (1977) Oilstick, oil pastel, pencil on paper 100 x 60 inches (254 x 152.4 cm)
Smith's inspirations often ran exotic. In his younger years, he traveled through traditional cultures in South America, Asia, China, Japan, and India.
“I always felt that these ancient cultures had tremendous sophistication and wisdom that we’ve lost,” he said. “The fact that all the work is a kind of pictographic language I think refers to those ancient cultures.”
Some of the ancient traditions also helped shape his own healing through paint, intention, and symbol.
“I saw monks in Nepal doing thangka paintings,” said Smith. “They infused healing energy into the painting – not just a painted Buddha, but embedded with blessings, so that the viewer receives a blessing or a healing or insight. I thought, I have this training from my father – why not use my art to help people?”
That intention carries into Smith’s most recent commissions. For a courthouse project in Miami-Dade County, he wanted to provide an oasis for people caught in life-altering legal matters.
(Photo by Oriol Tarridas)
Global Hypnosis, 2001. Oil, cold wax, magazines on canvas 48 x 59 inches (121.9 x 149.8 cm)
“No one enters or leaves a courthouse without their lives getting changed,” he said. “What I wanted to give them was a magic carpet that, while they’re there, they can let their mind travel elsewhere and know that there are bigger things than this particular court case.”
VISIONS, SYMBOLS, AND THE SEARCH FOR MEANING
Smith’s visually striking imagery is emotionally charged, often evoking intuitive response in viewers.
“There’s a picture of the telephone,” Smith explained. “That means something different to everybody. It elicits a response. You think about something else.”
(Photo by Oriol Tarridas)
Notes on Alchemy IV, 2024 Oil pastel on canvas, 84 x 72 inches (213 .3 x 182 .8 cm)
This symbolic openness allows viewers to insert their own stories.
“My friends from the Middle East see carpets,” he said. “My friends from China see porcelain. Everybody brings their own references.”
In this sense, his work serves as both a mirror and a doorway.
For Smith, the work is as much about presence as it is about practice.
“I spent 25 years of martial arts in a zen dojo,” he said. “It’s who I am. And who I am is transmuted into the work.”
Smith is mindful of the energy he brings into the studio.
(Photo by Oriol Tarridas)
Lumen, 2024. Oil pastel, pencil on canvas. 53 x 43 inches (134.6 x 109.2 cm
“Years ago, a friend of mine said, ‘Put the anger in your work.’ And I said, ‘No! I don’t want to manifest that. I don’t work in that state of mind.’ I really feel the work is guided. It kind of comes from somewhere else.”
Though highly intentional, Smith doesn’t claim full authorship over his images.
“I feel the work is guided. It comes from somewhere else,” he said. “You look at any great musician, novelist, inventor. They all say, I’m just the secretary. I’m just doing what it tells me. I think we open up different dimensions. We receive information – if you’re attuned.”
Smith’s reputation in the art world has been steadily growing since his early days in New York, where he gained recognition as part of Pictures, a 1977 gallery exhibition of the work of five artists, before turning to painting full-time. His work has been exhibited in the Whitney and Beijing Biennials and is represented in the permanent collections of renowned institutions including the Whitney Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
“I’ve been doing this for 50 years and those ideas had no traction in the culture,” Smith reflected. “But suddenly in the last year or two, these ideas are suddenly of interest to people. I think people are catching up with the work.”
Philip Smith: Magnetic Fields
Through October 5
Museum of Contemporary Art
750 NE 125 St., North Miami.