This month the TASIS Portugal Art Gallery is opening its doors to a new kind of visitor: not a parent, not a prospective family, but a working artist who will spend a week living inside the life of the school. John Smalley, an American painter, printmaker, and longtime teacher, arrives in Sintra on 21 September to launch our new Visiting Artist Program, an initiative that will bring professional artists onto campus each year to show their work, meet our community, and teach directly alongside our own art faculty.

His exhibition, Centuries: A Book of Dreams and Ghosts, fills the gallery with more than seventy drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, collages, and assemblages, many of them built from old letters, sheet music, postage stamps, and found photographs that Smalley has gathered over decades. The show is about time itself: memory, loss, and the way the past keeps resurfacing in the present. It comes with its own 44 page catalogue, including a foreword by Laura Chase, Assistant Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

"Paintings, drawings, prints, and collages are not what they represent.
They are the visible end of dreams, memories, and feelings."

John Smalley, Artist Statement, September 2026

Students across the school, from Lower School through IB, will get more than a chance to look. During his week on campus Smalley will lead gallery talks and studio workshops, and he will start a new large scale drawing right there in the gallery, adding to it a little each day so visitors can watch it take shape over the course of the show.

Before Sintra, Smalley spent thirty one years as Head of Visual Art at TASIS England, in Thorpe, Surrey, where he taught IB Visual Art alongside drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography, and ran the school's own Visiting Artist Program, the model for the one launching here. In 2004 he co-founded the Les Tapies Summer Arts and Architecture Program in Ardèche, France, which he directed until 2019 and which still runs today. He holds an MFA in Printmaking and Drawing from the University of Iowa and has held residencies with the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in County Mayo, Ireland.

We sat down with John Smalley to talk about the launch of our Visiting Artist Program, his week at TASIS Portugal, and what he hopes students took away from it.