ryan everett smith is a brooklyn-based multidisciplinary designer working between furniture, objects, and architecture. he recently earned his bfa in furniture design (with honors) from the rhode island school of design.
his work embraces the natural characteristics of wood as they situate his practice within reflections on positionality, tradition, and abstraction. he works with kiln-dried hardwoods and softwoods of varying species and prefers simpler processes, elemental geometries.
his process is personal, emotional, and spiritual when convenient, but he considers it necessary to confront the material abstraction symptomatic of industrial mass production and colonial systems of emplacement that regulate objects, materials, and cultures to a hierarchical discourse.
exhibitions
homecoming, risd museum 2025
risd furniture senior show, woods-gerry gallery (rhode island school of design) 2025
his work embraces the natural characteristics of wood as they situate his practice within reflections on positionality, tradition, and abstraction. he works with kiln-dried hardwoods and softwoods of varying species and prefers simpler processes, elemental geometries.
his process is personal, emotional, and spiritual when convenient, but he considers it necessary to confront the material abstraction symptomatic of industrial mass production and colonial systems of emplacement that regulate objects, materials, and cultures to a hierarchical discourse.
homecoming, risd museum 2025
risd furniture senior show, woods-gerry gallery (rhode island school of design) 2025
(counter)cosmogonies, beb gallery (rhode island school of design) 2024
landscape as, memorial hall (rhode island school of design) 2024
chipwich, memorial hall (rhode island school of design) 2024
in the palms of our hands, list gallery (brown university) 2023