Hughie Lee-Smith

Hughie Lee-Smith was born on the twentieth of September 1915 at Eustis, Florida, the son of Luther Smith — a Black orange-grove labourer of the Lake County Florida citrus economy — and Alice Williams Smith, a domestic. He was raised by his maternal grandmother at the small Black community of Eustis after his parents’ separation when he was a small child.

He was sent at ten to Cleveland, Ohio to rejoin his mother and stepfather, and was placed at the Cleveland Central High School. He took the four-year programme at the Cleveland School of Art — subsequently the Cleveland Institute of Art — from 1934 to 1938 as the only Black student in the institution of the period, completing the certificate in 1938. He was awarded the Cleveland Institute Scholastic Magazine prize for the principal student work of the 1937 graduating class.

He took further study at the Cleveland Museum of Art Print Club at the closing months of the 1930s and at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts in 1939 and 1940.

He took employment at the closing months of 1938 with the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration at the Cleveland WPA Office as a lithographic printer — and produced across the closing months of the Federal Art Project at Cleveland the principal early lithographs of his career.

He served the United States Navy from 1944 to 1946 as a steward’s mate first class on the USS Bountiful at the Pacific theatre — and on the close of the Pacific war completed the bachelor of science in art education at the Wayne State University at Detroit in 1953 on the G. I. Bill.

He taught art at the Karamu House at Cleveland — the principal Black community art centre of the American Midwest, founded by Russell and Rowena Jelliffe in 1915 — and at the Howard University at Washington, D.C. from 1969 to 1971.

He was elected on the second of October 1968 to the National Academy of Design at New York — the principal American academic-painting organisation of the period — as the second African American elected to the National Academy in its 143-year history, after Henry Ossawa Tanner (placed in this archive) in 1927.

He completed across the post-war period the principal portion of his mature career — a precisely-drawn surrealist-figurative painting in the manner of the late Giorgio de Chirico and Edward Hopper, depicting figures in vacant urban-industrial landscapes of the Midwest. The principal works of the mature period are The Stranger (1957–1958), The Wall (1962), Trapeze (1965), and Toward the Boundary (1972).

He was awarded across his career over fifty solo exhibitions in the United States, including the 1988 retrospective at the New Jersey State Museum at Trenton, and was elected to the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters in 1973.

He died at Albuquerque, New Mexico on the twenty-third of February 1999 of complications of cancer, at eighty-three.

He is honored here as the principal Black surrealist of post-war America.