Guy Richards Smit  Guy Richards Smit (born 1970) is an American performance artist, painter, and singer-songwriter in the band Maxi Geil! & PlayColt. He has shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, also in London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Valencia, Paris, Dublin, and Havana, among other places. He is represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. His Dutch father, J. W. Smit, was a Dutch language and literature professor at Columbia University and an expert on French composer Hector Berlioz. His Dutch-American mother, Pamela Richards, was a professor of library history. (She died in 1999, and his father in 2006.) Smit's sister, Marijke, is an urban planner who works with a green architectural firm in the Bay Area. His two older half-brothers (from his father's first marriage) are both in creative fields in the Netherlands: One, Tijn Smit, played keyboard on the Playcolt song, "Here Comes Maxi." Smit's great-great-great grandfather on his mother's side was Gulian Verplanck, who represented New York state in the United States Congress from 1825 to 1833 and later ran for mayor of New York City in the city's first open mayoral election. His maternal grandmother was a Billy Rose dancer. As a Manhattan teen, Smit was in a number of Alternative rock bands. He studied abroad for a year at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam as an undergraduate at Parsons, and lived for a year in Berlin. He then entered the Master of Fine Arts program at Rutgers where he learned of the work of New York performance artist Michael Smith. He described to "Vice" magazine encountering Smith's video, "Go for It, Mike," that he felt it was "the saddest, most amazing celebration of averageness that's ever been made. I saw that and realized this is what I want to do." Smit graduated in 1996. The subject of an ongoing performance and video series that started in 1996—Smit has said that he moved into video after growing terrified of performing live—Jonathan Grossmalerman, whose last name is pig-German for "big painter guy," is a successful, alcoholic New York painter who has moved into low-end comedy. He has recorded an album, written a book, and delved into movie-making. (The latter is explained in "Jonathan in Purgatory" (1999) as a feature titled "Sally" which ends with David Salle dying during an operation for reconstructive plastic surgery.)