Randy Kennedy

A wild card even by the rabble-rousing standards of the 1960s, he once said that he used himself in his art “because it is still unorthodox to use one’s self.”

He worked with elemental metals, granite, wood and brick in sculpture “free of human association.” His career was marred by accusations that he had a role in his wife’s fatal plunge.

“I wanted something physical, almost painful, passionate,” he said of his first major work, “American Moon,” presented in 1960. That was just the beginning.

Working with a paper magnate (and without a budget), he helped put together a collection that transformed the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s photography department.

Her store, Art Catalogues, specialized in books for and about museum and gallery exhibitions and became a gathering place for artists and bibliophiles.

Outside the art establishment for decades, Charles Smith has sculpted his Black heroes in Aurora, Ill., and now in Hammond, La. At 81, he’s getting his first show in New York.

“I had been on the treadmill for so long. And then suddenly I felt like I could just be an artist again,” he says. His long obsession with photo books has now taken full flight.

With his cartoonlike work that seemed to plumb the American subconscious, he was celebrated as a Pop artist, a surrealist, an eroticist and more.

A pioneer of the Conceptual art movement, he used words as his métier more than any other artist of his generation.

Nick Relph’s new book, “Eclipse Body & Soul Syntax,” collects years of digital street scans of New York City construction posters, an eerie portrait of a supersizing metropolis.