Travess Smalley

Travess Smalley, born in 1986 in Huntington, West Virginia, is an artist and educator based in Warwick, Rhode Island. He studied painting at Virginia Commonwealth University before earning a BFA in Studio Art from The Cooper Union in 2010 and an MFA in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2022. Alongside his studio practice, he teaches Print Media in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Rhode Island and serves as a Critic at RISD. He has taught courses in Programming Images and The Procedurally Generated Studio, framing generative methods within art historical traditions including Dada, Fluxus, and conceptual art. 

Smalley’s practice is based on feedback loops in which images pass through cycles of drawing, scanning, coding, printing, and re-digitizing, with each stage leaving new traces. He first began experimenting with AppleScript in Photoshop, an early moment when he saw code as a way of drawing. He often uses scans, screenshots, and file conversions as generative events, each one adding texture. He treats software as a material and uses code as a form of drawing, working with programmed rules alongside chance and improvisation.” His imagery draws equally from modern painting and everyday visual culture, taking cues from Matisse, Picasso, and Miró as well as the graphics of rave flyers, trapper keepers, and early web design. This process has shaped projects including the Pixel Rugs, large woven works made from digital image files; Emoji Script, a series of schematic portraits generated from coded instructions; and CRAWL, algorithmically produced terrains that expand his interest in landscape. He has also produced a substantial body of artist books, and his ongoing research project To Make a Flower develops a generative landscape program informed by Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield, and studies of natural growth systems.

Smalley has exhibited internationally in solo and group shows at the International Center of Photography in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Kunsthal Rotterdam, the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, and La Galerie in Noisy-le-Sec, in France, among others. His work is held in the collections of the Kandinsky Library at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York, ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, the Francisco Carolinum Museum in Linz, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. He received recognition early in his career with inclusion in Forbes 30 Under 30 for digital art, and later through the RISD Graduate Commons Grant and the Museum of the Moving Image × Tezos Community Curation shortlist.