Leon Polk Smith grew up in Oklahoma among the Native American Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes. At the age of 30, he enrolled at Columbia University and moved to New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life. He was a member of the so-called Hard-Edge school of Minimal, abstract art, the unofficial group consisting of Ellsworth Kelly, Myron Stout, Robert Indiana and Jack Youngerman to name a few. Many, including Polk Smith, were neighbors in the Coenties Slip area of New York. There was an affinity among these artists for the expressive power of color, line, edge and an economy of form.
“My canvases are something like a magnetic field, and they have to be alive all over; how far will the forces that are established by this division of color carry? And with a large painting using only two areas, this has to be felt very keenly so that the forces will carry across the canvas to the edge of the opposite side, with an aliveness that makes each part of the canvas tremendously sensitive and responsive to every other part.”
Leon Polk Smith's work is represented in many important public collections in the USA and in major museums in Argentina, Canada, Israel and Germany. In the year of his death, a retrospective was held at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.