Owen Smith is a professor at California College for the Arts. His illustration clients include Sports Illustrated, Time, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker, for which he has created 15 cover illustrations. He has recently completed work on a new children's book for Simon and Schuster. Owen's influences come from the WPA artists of the 1930s, Diego Rivera, and the lurid covers of pulp magazines and dime-store paperbacks of the 1930s and 1940s. His paintings have been featured in exhibitions in New York, Rome, and Milan, as well as solo shows in Los Angeles. In 1998, a set of mosaic murals Owen designed was permanently installed in a New York subway station at 36th Street in Brooklyn.