Hughie Lee-Smith place of birth Eustis
Life and career
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. She was strict with Lee-Smith, and when carnivals came to town she would not allow him to attend, an event which he describes as an experience which "must have sunk into my unconscious and manifested itself years later in my paintings: the balloons, ribbons, pennants." At age 10 he moved to Cleveland with his mother and grandmother (once his mother established her music career), 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 Detroit Society of Arts & Crafts (Center For Creative Studies, College of Art & Design)and Wayne State University (BA 1953.)
Lee-Smith attended East Technical High School (where he was president of the art club and ran track with Jesse Owens) 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 (WPA). 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 poor 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 Blacks 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 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 (Graduated 1953) 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
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