Mike Smoot
Mike Smoot currently lives in Southern Vermont. He completed Tamarind Institute’s Professional Printer Training Program in 2007 and has worked at several professional fine art print studios including Atelier Towson, The Experimental Print Institute, Tamarind Institute, Landfall Press, and Janus Press. He has given lectures and demonstrations on printmaking at Towson University, Goucher College, East Carolina University, Southeast Missouri State University, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Georgia State University, Valdosta State University, UMass Amherst, Bennington College, Keene State College, and Smith College. In addition, he has worked with a number of art related community organizations including, School 33, Art with Heart, Two Rivers Printmaking Studio, Governor's Institute of Vermont, Empty Bowls, Seedlings Program, and Baltimore Talent Development High School. He believes printmaking’s potentials for sustained collaborative effort, the negotiation of difference, and collective creative action make it a worthwhile pursuit.
My work is made using enduring printmaking techniques along with contemporary technologies to articulate my interest in past, present, and future social-political-economic-ecological interactions, phenomena, and potentials. I am intrigued by systems and the ways in which we generate, organize, and reproduce information. My work is the result of a process of continual investigation into these structures and how they inform our values and actions. I am pessimistically hopeful.