Hughie Lee-Smith

Hughie Lee-Smith was born on the twentieth of September 1915 at Eustis, Florida, spent his early childhood with his grandmother at Atlanta, and came at ten to Cleveland and his mother. Karamu House gave him his start — he studied there and later taught there — a national Scholastic magazine award at twenty earned him a year at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, and a scholarship from Karamu's Gilpin Players carried him through the Cleveland School of Art, where he graduated with honors in 1938 into the Ohio WPA's easel and lithography rolls.

The Navy took him in 1944 as an official artist at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, where he painted the mural History of the Negro in the U.S. Navy; the G.I. Bill then carried him to Wayne State University for a degree in art education in 1953. Through the Detroit years his true subject arrived: near-empty streets and shores, a solitary figure, a balloon, a ribbon on the wind, a crumbling wall — an American loneliness critics set beside de Chirico and Hopper, painted with a realist's patience and a poet's silence.

He moved East in 1958. Howard University had him as artist-in-residence from 1969 to 1971; the Art Students League of New York kept him fifteen years, from 1972 to 1987; and the National Academy of Design elected him — an associate in the 1960s and a full Academician by 1967 — only the second African American so honored, after Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1927.

The New Jersey State Museum at Trenton mounted his first retrospective in 1988, and his Boy with Tire hangs at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He lived his last years at Cranbury, New Jersey, and died on the twenty-third of February 1999 at Albuquerque, New Mexico, at eighty-three. Honored be Hughie Lee-Smith, who painted the wall and the balloon, the silence and the distance, until the country recognized its own face.