Beautiful Beatnik-Era Paper Planes From the Streets of NYC

 

There are many, many ways of folding a paper airplane, and from sometime in the 1960s to an undetermined year in the 1980s, Harry Everett Smith probably found one of each make on the streets of downtown New York. We’ll never know for sure, because the Beatnik artist, avant-garde filmmaker, and pseudo-anthropologist didn’t exactly catalog his collection. According to his surviving friends, he kept boxes upon boxes of them. But when he vacated rooms at the Chelsea Hotel and the Breslin, landlords probably threw some into the trash. He may have given some away as gifts. He lived at his friend Allen Ginsberg’s apartment for a while, and when Ginsberg sent him to Colorado to teach shamanism, he surely left many behind.
Smith did, however, donate a portion of his paper airplane collection to the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Studies. He died in 1991, and in 1994 the Smithsonian sent a box containing 251 planes to the Anthology Film Archives, where the collection was archived and photographed. More recently, those photographs—all 251 of them—were compiled in the book Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith ($35).
“There’s a lot of myth around Harry Smith,” says Andrew Lampert, one of the book’s editors. Here are a few facts: Smith was a collector of many things. Originally from Washington, Smith made his way to San Francisco, where he immersed himself in the burgeoning jazz scene. He amassed a vast collection of records—early jazz and World War II-era folk music. When he moved east to New York he recast that record collection into the Anthology of American Folk Music, a three-record set Folkways Records issued in 1952. It was a substantial contribution to the field of musicology, and in the book’s introduction, Lampert and co-editor John Klacsmann call the anthology Smith’s “greatest above-ground acclaim.”

It’s unclear whether Smith would have ever developed a similar omnibus with the paper airplanes. Given how scattered they became over time, it’s unlikely. But from Lampert and Klacsmann’s reporting, it’s clear that he took great pleasure in finding them. One of Smith’s old friends remembers him running out in front of moving taxicabs to fetch them; another said he guessed Smith liked studying the changes in the planes’ morphologies over the years. Indeed, the construction methods used to make the planes varies wildly. Some look as aerodynamic as a toy rocket; others are laughable in their construction. “My favorite is just a little cash register receipt,” Lampert says. “it’s miniature, but exquisitely folded.”
Smith was your prototypical Beat Generation artist. He experimented with filmmaking to create conceptual animations. He hung out with Allen Ginsberg, and moved in with him after he couldn’t pay to live elsewhere. He was a drunk and a mystic, and he gave lyrical but antagonistic answers to anyone who interviewed him. When asked if he considered painting or anthropology to be his truest vocation, he said “Well, naturally, of the two I consider my truest vocation to be anthropology,” which hints at why he was such a fervent collector. But then he also said, “But they are mere amusements, my true vocation is preparation for death.” All said, we might never really know why Smith collected these paper airplanes.
This isn’t the place to define the meaning of art, but you could easily say that one broad characterization of art is its ability to offer a new perspective on the world around us. However accidentally, Smith’s paper airplane collection is clearly a part of his larger oeuvre. “What’s so great about these images, and if you look at them the planes have wear and tear, skid marks from tires, soil, footprints on them,” Lampert says. “Clearly people aren’t looking and noticing them, but what we don’t notice is still present. They’re trampling on them, and it takes someone like Harry Smith to come along with his eyes to the ground, and his eyes to the air, and he got them all over Manhattan.”