Hughie Lee-Smith was an American artist and teacher whose surreal paintings often featured distant figures under vast skies, and desolate urban settings.
Life
Lee-Smith was born in Eustis, Florida to Luther and Alice Williams Smith; in art school he altered his last name to sound more distinguished. Shortly after his birth, Lee’s parents divorced and his mother moved to Cleveland to pursue a music career. As a child Lee-Smith moved to Atlanta to live with his grandmother, where the carnivals he attended would later provide imagery for his art. At age 10 he moved to Cleveland with his mother and grandmother, and attended classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and later the Cleveland Institute of Art and the John Huntington Polytechnic Institute, the Art School of the DetroitSociety of Arts & Crafts. Lee-Smith attended East Technical High School during the tenure of Harold Hunsicker as head of its art department. As a youth, he was active at Karamu as a dancer, performer, studio enrollee, and teacher trainee. In 1938, Lee-Smith graduated with honors from the Cleveland School of Art and worked for the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration. Like many WPA artists, Lee-Smith was concerned about the contribution art could make to the struggle for social justice and racial equality, and he created a series of lithographs on this theme. Lee-Smith’s “The Artist’s Life No.1,” a 1939 lithograph, is one of his early masterpieces. It is currently featured in an exhibition called “Hardship to Hope: African American Art from the Karamu Workshop” at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2929 Richmond Road, Beachwood, Ohio. Lee-Smith’s first job as an art teacher was at Claflin College in Orangeburg, S.C., in 1940. Newly married to Mabel Louise Everett, they returned to Orangeburg. The pay was so lousy for a man with a new bride that Lee-Smith gave up and moved to Detroit. He got a job as a core maker in one of Henry Ford’s factories. He worked there for about three years before joining the Navy for a 19-month stint. Stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center north of Chicago, Lee-Smith was one of three African-American artists commissioned to do “morale-building paintings” of Black in the Navy. While in the Navy he painted a mural entitled History of the Negro in the U.S. Navy. He also did portraits of the first Black naval officers. Hughie Lee-Smith and Mabel Louise Everett divorced in 1953. Although his divorce from Mabel Louise Everett, halfway through this period, was amiable, it had a “deathlike” impact on Lee-Smith. After his long journey and hard work he received a Bachelor of Science, in Art Education from Wayne State University in Detroit. Many years after winning a top prize for painting from the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1953, he recalled
I was no longer called black artist, Negro artist, colored boy. When I won that prize, all of a sudden, there was no longer a racial designation.
Mr. Lee-Smith's paintings usually have spare settings suggestive of theater stages or bleak urban or seaside landscapes. Walls stretch out under gray skies. Men and women, as lithe as dancers, seem frozen in place. Most are dressed in street clothes; some wear exotic masks. Children frequently appear, as do props reminiscent of circuses. The work has an air of mystery associated with the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and Edward Hopper.
