Anthony Peter Smith (September 23, 1912 – December 26, 1980) was an American sculptor, painter, architectural designer, and a noted art theorist.

[2] Smith was disillusioned with formal education, and returned to New Jersey in January 1932, where, during the Great Depression, he opened a second-hand bookstore in Newark on Broad Street.

After a brief period with Wright in Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, Smith worked building the Armstrong House in Ogden Dunes, Indiana.

He built approximately twenty private homes and envisioned many unrealized projects, such as the 1950 Model Roman Catholic Church, with paintings on glass by Jackson Pollock (1950).

He became a central member of the New York School community, with ties ranging from Gerome Kamrowski to Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.

This critical early work developed from a class assignment for students at Pratt to determine the simplest possible three-dimensional joint that could be stacked for more than two levels.

In 1960 a class project investigating close-packed cells based on D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's book Growth & Form (1918) sparked Smith's search for artistic inspiration in the natural world.

The dense rectangular prism, less than two feet high, developed from a mundane object, a 3 x 5" file card box that Smith saw on the desk of American Art critic and historian Eugene Goosen, his colleague and friend.

The title alluded to the corrupt administration of New York mayor Jimmy Walker (1926–32), when contractors would drop bribes into a slot in a "black" box.

[citation needed] It was deliberately placed on a thin base of two-by-four inch plywood pieces to call attention to its status as a work of art.

Fabricated in steel and weighing over 12,000 pounds, the later Source (1967) is a monumental sculpture which Smith first exhibited at documenta IV in Kassel, Germany in the summer of 1968.

[11] Allied with the minimalist school, Smith worked with simple geometrical modules combined on a three-dimensional grid, creating drama through simplicity and scale.

He designed two unrealized works, Haole Crater (a recessed garden) and Hubris, but eventually created The Fourth Sign that was sited on the campus.

[13] Smith's museum debut as a sculptor of large-scale, geometric sculpture was at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1966), followed by a nationwide traveling exhibition that began at the Andrew Dickson White House, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (1968), and a New Jersey–based traveling show organized by the Newark Museum and New Jersey State Council on the Arts (1970).

[10] A major retrospective, "Tony Smith: Architect, Painter, Sculptor," was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1998, including his architecture, painting, and sculpture.