G.R. Smith: A Life Lived

G.R. Smith: A life Lived
Remembered by colleague and friend Kurt Christian



On a cold day this past February, while walking down the street during my second week in my new home of Philadelphia, I received word that my good friend G.R. had slipped away after only three days in hospice care. I knew the inevitable was happening but still wasn’t braced for the impact it would have on me at that moment. G.R. had been diagnosed with what was to be, a very aggressive form of colon cancer just seven months earlier and was only 45 years old at the time of his death.

I first met G.R. Smith in 1996 while I was working in the New York office of Fine Arts Express (F.A.E.). I worked in the crate shop and G.R. worked in the warehouse. He seemed like a serious and quiet guy and we said hello to each other and worked in close proximity to one another, but it was really only during my second year there, when G.R. joined the crate shop that we became fast friends. We were both a long way from home with me being from Oklahoma and G.R. from Tennessee so our lives in NYC were both new, completely foreign, and exciting. Two things were clear after my first week of working with him; he was an incredible craftsman, and he had a wickedly dry and quick sense of humor. A week after I left F.A.E. to begin a new job at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1998 I called to speak to G.R. and was told he had an accident in the shop and had been taken to the hospital. Apparently a nail gun with a tendency to double fire had done so into G.R.’s thumb, sending a 2 ½” ring shank nail into the top of it with the point coming out somewhere near its base. The crate shop manager who was in the office at the time said G.R. casually walked in with the thing lodged in his thumb and calmly said, “Ronnie, what should I do about this?” Classic G.R.

G.R. started working for Artex, which was just a block from the Whitney’s off-site storage where I worked. We would have lunch most days and sometimes beers after work and would talk about our lives, art, literature, film, and music, always with a lot of laughs. After two years at Artex, G.R. also joined the Whitney where he stayed until 2008. G.R. was ultimately promoted to the position of art handler supervisor of packing and crating while he was at the Whitney and was a key contributor to the design, fabrication, and implementation of a very ambitious and long term project to create safe re-housings for Alexander Calder’s, Circus components. G.R. was also a pivotal figure in every major Whitney exhibition during these years (including several biennials, which is no small feat), and continued to make contributions to the design and fabrication of re-housings, packing, and crating of the museum’s permanent collections (including authoring a concise document of packing and crating specifications). In his own words, the most memorable exhibitions he worked on at the Whitney, were artist surveys of Sol Lewitt, Richard Tuttle, and Tim Hawkinson.

Also, and very importantly, it was during this time that G.R. met Brooke Gowen, who was later to become his wife and life partner.He was making art, working with incredible art that he admired at a major institution, and living his dream in New York City. It was a rich time in his life, with many important connections and experiences.



G.R. And Brooke, Chicago 2012


In 2006 I left the Whitney to take a job at the Saint Louis Art Museum and two years later convinced G.R. to apply for a newly created position of Senior Preparator. In 2008 Brooke and G.R. made their way west in his beloved Scion for a new life in the Midwest. Unfortunately for me, his stay in Saint Louis was brief as he was lured to a more lucrative position as Senior Preparator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in that same year. G.R. And Brooke settled into a new life in Chicago where they stayed and made their home. At the MCA Chicago, G.R. led the installation of major exhibitions by Alexander Calder, Simon Starling, Mark Bradford, and Doris Salcedo, to name just a few.

In the fall of 2014 G.R. came to Pittsburgh to be part of a panel discussion that presented at a workshop on packing and crating co-sponsored by PACCIN and ARCS. I was living in Pittsburgh, had helped organize the event, and was working at the Carnegie Museum of Art, so was lucky to spend some quality time with him before and after the event. G.R. was an avid cyclist (see bottom of PACCIN article London Calling: Interview with Mark Slattery) and I think I took him to almost every bike shop in Pittsburgh over the course of a single day. Sadly, it was the last time I saw him.



G.R., Chicago 2012




Caitlin Bermingham, Greg Gahagan, and GR at PACCIN/ARCS packing and crating workshop, Pittsburgh 2014


Throughout all of these years G.R. and I had routine phone calls that went well into the night. We chatted about what was happening in our lives and all those other topics we had always discussed. The week before he passed away we were texting back and forth and he still had a sense of humor and joked about eating fettuccini Alfredo. If you knew him you could actually hear in your head the way he would say that and it would crack you up. It was all in the delivery and I’ll always be able to hear his voice. He was completely engaged as a museum professional, a caring and loving husband to his wife Brooke, and father to his son Logan, and also one of my very best friends. For all of us who had the pleasure of working with and knowing him, his passing is a difficult thing to accept and process. An acknowledgement of him and his contributions to our profession is both fitting and necessary. Goodnight my brother, you are missed more than you could ever know.