UT Studio Art Professor in Transmedia Michael Smith’s major historical installation, Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter Snack Bar, 1983, has been acquired by the Department of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work was first shown at Castelli Graphics and The New Museum in New York in 1983 and has also been exhibited in at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin and the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, amongst others.
"With its leadership acknowledged globally and the remarkable comprehensiveness of its collections, MOMA has become the museum of record for all artists active today,” said UT Department of Art and Art History Chair Susan Rather. “A limited number of works enter the collection in any given year, and to join this highly select group is a singular honor. Michael Smith's achievement brings honor as well to our UT campus, to his colleagues, and to his students.”
The majority of Smith’s work chronicles the dreams and adventures of his performance persona, “Mike,” the prescient, naïve and somewhat inept Everyman who navigates the absurdities of contemporary American life. Over the course of many years, “Mike” has developed and aged with the artist. He has built a fallout shelter; had his own tv variety show; entered a disco dancing competition; starred in a music video; had a business that went bankrupt; and was an artist with a loft for sale, amongst other pursuits.
Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter Snack Bar places Mike in Cold War era suburbia, where he brings his party planning skills to nuclear preparedness. Using blueprints published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he builds a fallout shelter, stocked with liquor, tchotchkes and an awning that, in case of attack, can be tilted down to form a bomb shelter that entombs its occupant in cinderblocks.
With its absurd promise of uninterrupted leisure amid nuclear annihilation, the survival plan appeals to Mike’s affection for directions, lists and DIY projects—which Smith uses to humorous critical effect. A series of drawings inserts Mike into didactic illustrations, beginning as a gracious host and ending confident and somewhat cowardly, hiding behind the shelter while his erstwhile party guests receive nuclear sunburns. The installation features the first instance of a video game used in an artwork.
Smith has been teaching transmedia and performance art since 2001 at The University of Texas at Austin. In a 2019 profile, curator Annette DiMeo Carlozzi said of Smith, “As a professor here at the College of Fine Arts, students get to interact with somebody who is living the best moments of his career internationally, right now. He's so generous and collaborative by nature that he pulls back the curtain and lets them see how it's done.”