Hughie Lee-Smith has works in the collection Smithsonian American Art Museum
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.
In 1967 Lee-Smith became an associate member of the National Academy of Design, then the second African-American to be elected to the Academy, after Henry Ossawa Tanner, and was made a full member four years later. In 1994 he was commissioned to paint the official portrait of David Dinkins, former Mayor of New York City, for the New York City Hall. Retrospectives of Lee-Smith's work were mounted by the New Jersey State Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1988, and Ogunquit Museum of American Art in 1997. Lee-Smith's works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Art, Howard University, the San Diego Museum of Art, and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Manhattan.Lee-Smith met Patricia Thomas-Ferry, a student at the Art Students League, in the spring of 1978. Late that year they rented an apartment near the League, and they married a few days before Christmas. This third marriage would be happy and lasting, and the couple would make their home in New Jersey in 1981.
In 1999 Lee-Smith died of cancer in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was 83.
Work
In 1945, Lee-Smith had his first one-man exhibitions at the South Side Community Art Center and at Snowden Galleries in Chicago.
Paintings
holds works in the collection