Willie Wayne Smith’s large-scale public work titled Weather Permitting was located at 35 E. Grand River in downtown Detroit.

Smith has a diverse painting practice in which he utilizes a range of processes that stem from abstraction, photo-realism, assemblage, pop art, and surrealism. Working primarily with acrylics and an airbrush, he creates stream of consciousness works that reinterpret personal experience within a complex array of art languages. His most recent text-filled paintings are loosely based on the motif of coloring book pages.

Smith’s work has also been included in two-person and group exhibitions in cities including New York, Los Angeles, and Baltimore. He earned his MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2010 and his BFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2006. In 2015 he was a nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant in New York. He grew up between Lakeland, Florida and Limbe, Haiti where his parents were a medical missionary and a Peace Corps agriculturalist.