Hughie Lee-Smith
Birth Date: September 20, 1915
Death Date: February 23, 1999
Artist Gallery
Born in Eustis, Florida in 1915 to parents who divorced soon after his birth, Hughie Lee-Smith (added the hyphen to his name as a teenager to give it more artistic panache) spent his early years in Atlanta, Georgia under the care of his maternal grandmother while his mother pursued a singing career in Cleveland. Lee-Smith’s grandmother lived a middle-class lifestyle and she strove to impart these standards to her grandson. By 1925, Lee-Smith’s mother had established herself as a singer, and Lee-Smith and his grandmother went to live with her in Cleveland. The two women nurtured Lee-Smith’s talent for drawing and painting. He was enrolled in classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1925, moving on to the Cleveland School of Art (Cleveland Institute of Art) in two years. After finishing high school in 1934, Lee-Smith obtained a scholarship at the Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute, which enabled him to further study at the Detroit Institute of Arts and Crafts. The following year Lee-Smith received a scholarship at Cleveland’s Karamu House (a settlement house devoted to the educational and cultural needs of the surrounding black community.) A condition of this scholarship was that he would spend a year teaching at the settlement. In 1938, Lee-Smith graduated from the Cleveland School of Art and worked for the Federal Arts Projects (WPA). In 1943, he was drafted into the United States Navy and was stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Base, near Chicago. In the 1950’s, Lee-Smith moved away from the WPA-era themes of labor and history. Lee-Smith created deeply personal landscapes populated by figures whose ethnic features were often ambitious or who, even when assigned a distinct racial identity, functioned as universal embodiments of loneliness, introspection or human existence, thus expanding the category of the “everyman” to include men and women of diverse identity. His work encompasses the “real world” boarded tenements, crumbling brick, crackled facades and empty streets; a depiction of the actual poverties that exist in the slums, ghettos and inner cities of the United States. During the 1960s, the violent responses to the Civil Rights movement in parts of the country left Lee-Smith pessimistic over the possibility of attaining in what he later described as "the youthful dream of a world free of the tentacles of racism." In the late 1960s, Lee-Smith took an artist-in-residency at Howard University and worked as the acting chair of its art department. Lee-Smith continued to paint right up until his death in 1999.