ARTIST STATEMENT:

With this painting Smith joins the ranks of painters who bear witness to political violence, such as Leon Golub (1922–2004), Sue Coe (b. 1951), and Francisco Goya (1746–1828). Like Golub’s massive Mercenaries series (from the same era), Boys Night Out places the viewer’s focus on the perpetrators, not the victim. Golub has said that this tactic highlights the complicity of the viewer with the system of violence. Smith pulls off a similar trick by allowing the face of the monstrous neo-Nazi to dominate the frame. But the image of Mulugeta, imprinted on the bat, becomes a reflection, and we embody his pain and distress.

The outcry surrounding the crime suggested that this act of violence was an outlier. However, believing that racially motivated brutality belongs only to the pre–civil rights era is willful ignorance. In Boys Night Out, Smith chronicled the murder of a Black man who was beaten to death by three white supremacists a decade before Byrd. The shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012, the choking of Eric Garner in 2014, and the ongoing murders of countless Black men show that lynching is alive and well. It wasn’t until 2018, a full twenty years after Byrd was killed, that the Senate passed anti-lynching legislation, called the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act.

In Smith’s words, “We left the South to have the freedom not to be lynched.” Byrd is painted in the style of a Depression-era Black bumpkin. Our view is from the pavement as the truck speeds off in the upper-right corner and the chain goes taut. Klansmen look on impassively. The bodies of the three frontal figures are painted with the numbered targets of a shooting-range placard. One is African American, one Native American, and the third Asian. Like Boys Night Out, this painting shakes with a red rage.

In Slave in a Box, Smith continues to expose the ubiquitous corporate symbols that have become so familiar in our commercial landscape that we forget their origins. The Colonel from Kentucky Fried Chicken is a not-quite-rehabilitated plantation owner; Rastus (Cream of Wheat) and Aunt Jemima represent comfort food, visual holdovers from the dream of the beloved and benign house slave. The roles of the sacred and the profane are always at odds in fine art. The profane image-world of our daily lives is punctuated with derogatory stereotypes. One might hope to make aspirational imagery, but the vulgar reflects our on-the-ground reality. There is power in the muck of commercial images. This is Smith’s prima materia.

Smith begins his paintings by covering the canvas with a red ground. The red underpainting serves as a chromatic radiant-heating system. One can speak of colors as “hot” or “cool.” A painting by Smith is heated with an expertly applied palette of warm colors. The heat is both formal in terms of the color and symbolic in terms of cultural signifiers. Subject matter and color merge. The golds, ochers, cadmium reds, and oranges in Saturday Night Fish Fry typify this approach. Even the lumbering kelly-green Klansman in the background has contact heat. How different this image would be if it were dominated by cool blues or neutral colors. One might think about Smith’s use of a hot palette as the phrasing of a musician—which note they choose to draw out and which to speed along makes all the difference between the sublime and the ridiculous.

Arvie Smith, Manumissions, 2006, oil on canvas

The central narrative in Manumissions is a lynching, with a figure in the right panel hoisting the shackled Black body into a tree in the left panel. A rabble gathers at the lower left, people who have gathered to witness and even celebrate the lynching. There is even a fiddler performing, accompanying the white protagonist, as if the lynching were a source of entertainment. The three central figures on the right panel stand on an ornate tomb which houses dead African Americans. The ship in the left panel is the USS Constellation, a sloop-of-war docked in Baltimore, where Smith lived from 1990-1995.

In the Algonquin tale “The Listener,” the hero is served a stew that contains all the pain and heartache of the world. He cannot leave the frozen hut until he drinks it, out of deference to his host, the witch. Sipping the brew through the hollow shaft of his arrow allows him to take in the pain in little bits—not enough to kill him, but enough to satisfy the witch. This ingestion is akin to what Smith is up to when he presents a figure that resembles an exaggerated Buckwheat (from Our Gang or The Little Rascals) eating a sexualized chicken sandwich. Smith’s work proposes that corporate brands are extensions of systemic oppression, and they must be dismantled, sip by awful sip.

The central figure is surrounded by a panoply of caricatures and figures from pop culture. The figure at the left edge of the painting is a pimp, a person (usually male) who profiteers at the expense of others. His left hand gesture, “three,” could refer to three centuries of racial discrimination in America. Cartoon characters Popeye, Dagwood and Blondie Bumstead (from the comic strip Blondie), and Little Orphan Annie share the picture plane with stereotypic tribal figures, a Sambo figure playing the trumpet, and a Black domestic servant suckling a white infant swaddled in the American flag and star bands from the Confederate flag.