Roland David Smith was born on March 9, 1906 in Decatur, Indiana and moved to Paulding, Ohio in 1921, where he attended high school. From 1924-25, he attended Ohio University in Athens (one year) and the University of Notre Dame, which he left after two weeks because there were no art courses. In between, Smith took a summer job working as a riveter on a frame assembly line in the Studebaker automobile plant. He then briefly studied art and poetry at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Moving to New York in 1926, he met Dorothy Dehner (to whom he was married from 1927 to 1952) and, on her advice, joined her painting studies at the Art Students League of New York. While in New York, Smith found himself in the midst of the artistic vanguard. He looked closely at work by European modernists Alberto Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso and Julio González, and he made friends with many of the leading artists of the time; Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Milton Avery, and Adolph Gottlieb. In 1933 Smith changed his artistic focus from painting to sculpture, though he continued to draw and paint in watercolor throughout his life. In developing his sculpture, Smith found inspiration in Giacometti’s surrealist bronze figures and Picasso’s and González’s cubist metal constructions of 1928–1929. He drew, too, on his experience as a welder. Rejecting traditional modes of artistic production, Smith turned to welding metal as a new artistic tactic that he believed was more relevant to the industrial and scientific age. He was able to create a studio within a Brooklyn welding shop, Terminal Iron Works, a name he used later for a his Bolton Landing studio in upstate New York. Smith’s early works are free-standing, abstract constructions combining organic and geometric forms, their surfaces painted with swirling brushstrokes.

Like many of his contemporaries, Smith participated in the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project in New York but In 1940, the Smiths distanced themselves from the New York art scene and moved permanently to Bolton Landing, NY near Lake George. At Bolton Landing, he ran his studio like a factory, stocked with large amounts of raw material. The artist would put his sculptures in what is referred to as an upper and lower field, and sometimes he would put them in rows, "as if they were farm crops". During World War II, Smith worked as a welder for the American Locomotive Company, Schenectady, NY assembling locomotives and M7 tanks. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College.

After the war, with the additional skills that he had acquired, Smith released his pent-up energy and ideas in a burst of creation between 1945 and 1946. His output soared and he went about perfecting his own, very personal symbolism. Traditionally, metal sculpture meant bronze casts, which artisans produced using a mold made by the artist. Smith, however, made his sculptures from scratch, welding together pieces of steel and other metals with his torch, in much the same way that a painter applied paint to a canvas; his sculptures are almost always unique works.

Smith, who often said, "I belong with the painters," made sculptures of subjects that had never before been shown in three dimensions. He made sculptural landscapes (e. g. Hudson River Landscape), still life sculptures (e. g. Head as Still Life) and even a sculpture of a page of writing (The Letter). Perhaps his most revolutionary concept was that the only difference between painting and sculpture was the addition of a third dimension.

Smith continued to paint and especially to draw throughout his life. By 1953 he was producing between 300 and 400 drawings a year. His subjects encompassed the figure and landscape, as well as gestural, almost calligraphic marks made with egg yolk, Chinese ink and brushes and, in the late 1950s, the ‘sprays’. He usually signed his drawings with the ancient Greek letters delta and sigma, meant to stand for his initials.

Smith was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950, which was renewed the following year. Freed from financial constraints, he made more and larger pieces, and for the first time was able to afford to make whole sculptures in stainless steel. He also began his practice of making sculptures in series, the first of which were the Agricolas of 1951-59. He steadily gained recognition, lecturing at universities and participating in symposia.Beginning in the mid-1950s, Smith explored the technique of burnishing his stainless steel sculptures with a sander, a technique that would find its fullest expression in his Cubi series (1961–65), Probably his best known series, the sculptures in this series are made of stainless steel with a hand-brushed finish reminiscent of the gestural strokes of Abstract Expressionist painting. The Cubi works consist of arrangements of geometric shapes, which highlight his interest in balance and the contrast between positive and negative space. The scale of his work continued to increase with some Cubi works reaching 13' tall. The Cubis were Smith’s most signature works.

In 1962, the Italian government invited Smith to make sculptures for the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto. Given open access to an abandoned steel mill and provided with a group of assistants, he produced an amazing 27 pieces in 30 days. Not yet finished with the themes he developed, he had tons of steel shipped from Italy to Bolton Landing and over the next 18 months he made another 25 sculptures known as the Voltri-Bolton series.

Despite his untimely death in a car crash in 1965 at the age of 59, Smith’s work was recognized early in his career and was included in major exhibitions during his lifetime. His first solo show of drawings and welded-steel sculpture was held at the prestigious Marion Willard Gallery in New York in 1938. In 1941, Smith sculptures were included in two traveling exhibitions organized by The Museum of Modern Art and were shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art's Annual exhibition in New York. Smith represented the United States in the 1951 São Paulo Art Biennial, Brazil, and at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and 1958. Six of his sculptures were included in an exhibition organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, that traveled to Paris, Zurich, Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Oslo in 1953-54; he was given a retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1957. And again in 1961, the MoMA organized an exhibition of fifty Smith sculptures that traveled throughout the United States until the spring of 1963. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted a retrospective in 1964, David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy. Smith’s imaginative assemblages and strong, energetic designs are ranked among the most influential sculpture in American art.