Orlando Smith AKA O. Smith was born and raised in South Central, Los Angeles. He is currently serving 8 life sentences at California’s San Quentin State Prison under the draconian Three Strikes Law. His illustrative reporting has been published in the Columbia Journalism Review and The Prison Journalism Project.
Smith has been featured in over two dozen exhibitions since 2017, including Meet us Quickly with Your Mercy: Painting for Justice, Museum of the African Diaspora(2020); Mothership: Voyage into Afrofuturism, The Oakland Museum of California, (2021); Commonstrust: Artists and the Commons Thacher Gallery, USF, (2022); a solo show, O. Smith Perspective, Manna Gallery, Oakland (2022); Work Assignments: Forced Prison Labor in the Land of the Free, several Bay Area locations (2023 & 2024); Seeing Through Stone, Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Santa Cruz, (through Jan.5th 2025); Paperchained International, Boom Gate Gallery, Australia (2024); Innocence, SF Opera House (2024); Involuntary Servitude Digital Billboard campaign for Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, California(2024). He is on permanent display at the University of Derby in England. In Spring 2024 he participated in two Yale University Teach-Ins. the upcoming exhibition Painting Ourselves Into Society, Berkeley Art Center (September 21st 2024 - January 12th, 2025) is his curatorial debut followed by Finding Freedom From The Inside: Stories Shaped In And Out of Incarceration with U.C.Berkeley, La Pena Cultural Center(September 16th—October 19th 2024).
To see one of his short graphic novels check out
San Quentin News, Awakenings.
ACTIONS TO FREE O.SMITHSign Orlando’s Change.org petition and write comments asking the governor to grant him a commutation
HERE.
