Vincent Smith “For My People”

Alexandre Gallery

[Image: Vincent Smith "For My People" (1965) oil on Masonite, 49 x 46 in.]

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Alexandre presents a solo exhibition of paintings by Vincent Smith (b. 1929, Brooklyn, New York; d. 2003, New York, New York), Vincent Smith: For My People. The exhibition will include sixteen oil paintings ranging from 1954 to 1972, depicting the celebrations and struggles of African American life in New York City throughout this socially and politically turbulent period.

Throughout his decades-long career, Smith served as narrator of the experiences of the communities of Brooklyn and Harlem in which he lived and revelled. While struggling to support himself in his early years as an artist, Smith lived a bohemian lifestyle, attending jazz clubs most nights of the week alongside his famed musician friends, and training his eye as a careful documenter of the everyday. Later, he became involved with the fight for equality in the civil rights movement. Out of this environment was born Smith’s drive to create a true expression of his people and times, rendered in his own singular modernist language.

Visit the quiet and passionately inquiring mind of Vincent Smith and what is gently revealed is an impressive and dynamic display of Black history, memory and creative workmanship in a very unique visual experience. Undaunted by the difficulties one encounters in a racially repressive society in which many African Americans often struggle daily to live above the poverty line, Vincent Smith, like his life long friend, Jacob Lawrence, has chosen art as the vehicle through which he speaks to the world airing his concerns about our humanity as well as our inhumanity to each other. Smith’s art examines, chronicles and visually comments upon an important segment of American history thereby singling him out as one of the few remaining American artists whose work is truly social commentary in nature. – David C. Driskell, 2003