Starting his career as an architect, Smith used concepts of repetition and
multiplication to produce his sculptures. His work greatly contributed to the
Minimalism movement in the 1960s. The Snake is Out is a prime example of his contribution to Minimalism and his systematic way of creating pieces. The work began as a chance arrangement of units with no particular base. The title comes from John McNulty’s Third Avenue Medicine, where it describes veins and arteries as snakes that run along a man’s forehead.