New Collages by Winston Smith Continue His Mission to Hack Up Capitalism

At the end of May, beloved San Francisco collage artist Winston Smith suffered a heart attack that stopped him in his tracks. At the time, he was due to premiere a show of new and classic works on June 6 at North Beach’s Studio Fallout, a gallery that the artist also curates.

With characteristic good humor, Smith told his fans that while he would be resting for the foreseeable future, his “guardian angels were definitely working over-time,” and that the health scare made him feel “just a little bit pregnant.”

Smith’s planned show, I Saw But I Did Not See, will now go up for one night only at 111 Minna on Aug. 21, accompanied by a punk rock karaoke event. Alongside classic works capturing the pain and absurdity of modern living, there will be a number of new pieces that present — among other things — images of childhood glee and wholesome living corrupted by the presence of cold, hard cash.

Smith is most widely known for his album artwork for likes of Green Day, Dead Kennedys and George Carlin. This new work continues Smith’s legacy of creating anarchic images that question the status quo, American concepts of progress, and the state of democracy.

One new piece, A Paranoid’s Dilemma, features the face of a screaming man surrounded on all sides by a confusion of camera lenses. Another, Saint Nick’s Big Bash, presents Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper interspersed with ’50s-era partygoers, children carrying firearms and, yes, you’ve guessed it, more cold hard cash.