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Paul Anthony Smith: Melodies from a running spring

Paul Anthony Smith (b. 1988, Jamaica) is known for works that trace the movements and memories of the Caribbean diaspora. Smith punctures the surfaces of his photographs with a handmade tool to add texture and pattern. This signature technique, which he calls picotage, is a meticulous process he derived from his early training in ceramics. The use of picotage serves as an exploration of photography’s creative potential, transforming each image into a layered, textured object.

Presented on 300 JCDecaux bus shelters in New York City, Boston, and Chicago, Melodies from a running spring features nine new grayscale works. From early colonial drawings to contemporary tourist marketing campaigns, popular imagery has often sensationalized and romanticized Jamaica and the Caribbean, erasing its natives and depicting vibrant natural settings. By exhibiting grayscale images on spaces typically used for colorful advertising, Smith rejects these tropical fantasies, reimagining Jamaica from his own perspective. 

“Jamaica” comes from the Indigenous Taíno word meaning “Land of Springs.” The exhibition title, Melodies from a running spring, suggests the artist’s dreams or visions from Jamaica. Each piece features a photographic portrait—sometimes of a single figure, other times two—set in a natural landscape. Smith’s picotage disrupts these photographs in various ways: their backgrounds are sliced by geometric grids, the landscape is obscured by fields of perforation, and in some cases, the figures dissolve almost entirely into texture. 

For this series, Smith photographed two Caribbean figures—St. Thomian Olympic fencer Daryl Homer, and Jamaican interdisciplinary artist Zachary Fabri. Though their practices differ, Smith finds congruences in their life stories and physical movements. For Smith, they evoke duppies, spirits common in Jamaican folklore who bridge the past and present, resisting fixity and erasure. These images invite viewers into a space shaped by ambiguity—where memory is fragmented, meaning remains unfixed, and new ways of seeing and imagining the past can emerge.

Paul Anthony Smith: Melodies from a running spring is curated by Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand.

Image Credit
Paul Anthony Smith
Melody #6, 2025
Unique picotage on inkjet print, mounted on museum board
Courtesy of the artist
Presented by Public Art Fund as a part of Paul Anthony Smith: Melodies of a running spring, an exhibition on 300 JCDecaux bus shelters in New York, Chicago, and Boston, July 9 – Sept 7, 2025.

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About the Artist

Paul Anthony Smith (b. Jamaica, 1988) creates paintings and picotage on pigment prints that explore the artist’s autobiography, as well as issues of identity within the African diaspora. Referencing both W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness and Franz Fanon’s theory of diasporic cultural confusions caused by colonialism, Smith alludes to fences, borders, and barriers to conceal and alter his subjects and landscapes. Smith’s practice celebrates the rich and complex histories of the post-colonial Caribbean and its people. Memory, migration and home are central to Smith’s work, which probes questions of hybrid identities between worlds old and new. Smith’s layered picotage is often patterned in the style of Caribbean breeze block fences and modernist architectural elements that function as veils, meant both to obscure and to protect Smith’s subjects from external gaze. While photography typically functions as a way in which to reveal and share information, Smith’s picotage has a concealing and purposefully perplexing effect. Forcing these nuanced diasporic histories into a singular picture plane, Smith encourages layers of unease within these outwardly jovial portraits. Picotage serves as an access point as Smith interrogates which elements of identity are allowed to pass through the complexities of borders and migration.

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