Sam Smith

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American artist whose paintings have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Biltmore Galleries in Los Angeles, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, the Fine Arts Galleries at the University of New Mexico and the Roswell Museum and Art Center. His work can be seen in the permanent collections of the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, Arlington State College in Texas, and the New Mexico State Fair Collection. His awards include the 1960 Oil Purchase Prize at the New Mexico State Fair, the Questa Purchase Prize in 1962, the Grand Award Prize at the Artist’s Alpine Holiday Show in 1964 and 1965 and the Grand Award at the Black Canyon Art Exhibition in Hotchkiss, Colorado. In March 1948 he married Harriette Holley Hening, the daughter of Horace Brand Hening, a New Mexico pioneer resident and editor of The Albuquerque Journal and The New Mexico Stockman. In 1950 he began a teaching career in the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. He taught watercolor and oil painting until his retirement in 1986. The Smiths had three children, all born in April, three years apart: Cézanne, Rembrandt and Michelangelo. Holley Smith took her own life in 1974. Sam Smith married Elizabeth Childers Black on 31 May 1978. He died on 23 May 1999, aged 81, in Montrose, Colorado. Link to Wikipedia biography