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. Smith enlarged the proportions of the box five times, like a recent class assignment. He phoned a local fabricator, Industrial Welding, whose billboard he had seen while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike and asked them to deliver it to his suburban home. Although the welders assumed he was crazed, they treated the project with the utmost workmanship and the result was a stunning form to Smith. With this piece, entitled Black Box, Smith had discovered a sculpting process that he continued to hone. Where others saw a pure geometric shape, Smith saw it as a mysterious form. 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. is Black Box was set on the site of the black wood-burning stove in the little house he had lived in as a small child, so it functioned as a kind of gravestone. 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. In 1962, he made Die, a 6' steel cube that established his reputation as one of the most influential and important artists of his time. The Elevens Are Up (1963) follows formally on Die. Inspired by the two veins on the back of the neck which are accentuated when one has had too much to drink, the sculpture consists of two black steel masses installed face to face, four feet apart. 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. After exhibiting massive, black-painted plywood and metal works at several sites across the United States and internationally, Smith was featured on the October 13, 1967 cover of Time with his plywood structure Smoke (1967) enveloping the atrium of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. Allied with the minimalist school, Smith worked with simple geometrical modules combined on a three-dimensional grid, creating drama through simplicity and scale. During the 1940s and 1950s Smith became close friends with Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark