Leon Polk Smith was a Cherokee American painter known for works which blended Native American design and hard-edge geometrically-oriented abstract paintings on unframed canvases of unusual shapes. While his style had originally been inspired by artists such as Piet Mondrian, he took geometric abstraction a step further, cultivating the Hard-Edge and Minimal painting styles in the late 1950s. “I can’t imagine that there is an end to space. It tells us that we are to keep going, to be optimistic,” he commented on his conceptual exploration of space through art. Smith was born on May 20, 1906 and grew up on farms and ranches among Choctaw and Chickasha Native American communities in present-day Oklahoma. He graduated from Oklahoma...