Harry Smith at the Whitney

At the Whitney Museum of American Art, an exhibition devoted to the life and work of Harry Smith, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith:

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith puts the artist’s life on display alongside his art and collections. It follows him from an isolated Depression-era childhood in the Pacific Northwest — a time when he was immersed in ecstatic religious philosophies and Native American ceremony — to his bohemian youth of marijuana, peyote, and intellectualism in postwar Berkeley, California. The exhibition also traces his path through the milieus of bebop and experimental cinema in San Francisco to his decades in New York, where he was an essential part of the city’s avant-garde fringe.

Harry Smith is probably best known as the mind behind the Anthology of American Folk Music (Folkways, 1952). That too is part of the exhibit.