A starry light
Long overlooked, Houston artist George Smith celebrated at Art League
By Molly Glentzer STAFF WRITER
The sculptor George Smith, at 77, has an imposing physical presence. But until Art League Houston honored him with its lifetime achievement award and a solo exhibition this fall, his work had become nearly invisible — even in the city he has called home for 37 years.
That seems like an injustice.
In the opening essay for the show’s catalog, Jim Harithas writes that Smith’s sculpture “represents a major advance in American consciousness” and calls him “one of the greatest artists in a generation of important European and American artists.”
Harithas’ support for Smith’s work dates at least to the early 1970s, when Harithas directed the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y. Shortly afterward, Harithas became director of Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum; Smith was on his list of artists to feature with solo shows when he was let go in 1978.
Who knows what turns the sculptor’s career might have taken if that show had happened?
Harithas wasn’t Smith’s only champion. In the early 1990s, Dominique de Menil bought Smith’s wall sculpture “Spiral to the Next World” to help finance the artist’s second trip to West Africa. In a letter of support, she wrote, “His work shows strength and integrity, and he is on the edge of becoming one of the ten or twelve best black sculptors.”
That narrow classification as a “black sculptor” has dogged Smith all his life. He appeared in many group shows in Houston and beyond, but they were almost always exhibits about AfricanAmerican artists. More recently, he’s referred to more often as one of the “magnificent seven” founders of Project Row Houses, with no mention at all of his personal work.
“My father isn’t in a lot of collections here in Houston, which is why this lifetime achievement award is so important,” says his daughter Kaneem Smith, also an artist. (She has a solo show opening Nov. 24 at the Galveston Arts Center.)
The Smiths came to Houston in 1981, after he was recruited by another professor to teach at Rice University, where he stayed until retiring in 2010. De Menil thought his dedication to teaching cost him opportunities to fully concentrate on his art “and develop it boldly,” but Smith says he doesn’t see it that way. At Rice, he had a studio, materials and a place to work — no small thing for a guy whose art involved welding steel.
Smith produced a number of large, outdoor public sculptures. Some were temporary, but the University of HoustonDowntown has the permanent “Bandiagara,” from 1991; Dallas has two major public pieces, and Smith’s hometown of Buffalo, N.Y., has one.
Many Houstonians know about influential painter and Texas Southern University professor John Biggers’ love affair with Africa. Smith’s art is just as driven by those spiritual instincts, but he applies them differently, infusing mythological symbolism and aspects of Dogon culture into powerfully abstract and minimal sculpture.
The son of a steel worker who had a painterly, folkartist streak, Smith earned his undergraduate degree at the San Francisco Art Institute during the wild, improvisational jazz-fueled 1960s. He studied with some great contemporary artists there, including Bruce Nauman and Fletcher Benton, but California sculpture at that time tended to be colorful and fluid.
Smith’s attitude changed during graduate school at Hunter College in New York, where he embraced Abstract Expressionism and geometryfueled Minimalism, inspired by artists such as Robert Morris, Ad Reinhardt, Franz Kline and Tony Smith, who was one of his professors.
Tony Smith also may have encouraged him to study and embrace West Africa’s geometrically based, Dogon symbolism. Facts like that don’t come easily to him now; his memory issues have remained stable, but doctors suspected eight years ago that Smith has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
Tony Smith also taught him to leave “maker’s marks” in his welds, the messy seams that show the artist’s hand. Those marks took on profound meaning as he began using them to represent the scarification he’d seen on the faces of African elders. Not that his mentor encouraged him to venture too far from the strict boundaries of Minimalism.
“Ammas Return,” a painted steel wall sculpture from 1994, is the only piece in the show — and may be the only piece Smith has made — with a surface that’s a messy ripple. “When I used to do stuff like that, they’d tell me, ‘Don’t do that,’ ” he said. “That’s what they do in school. It happens to everyone. And when you get out of school, you do what you want to do. It’s like a jazz musician — you knock all that stuff out and play like a baby, like you don’t know anything.”
The league’s tightly edited show gives viewers a keen sense of what they’ve been missing. In a strong and stark palette of black, red and white, its 23 pieces include a collection of small, painted steel sculptures and a number of larger, magnificent oil stick paintings on paper. All reference Dogon mythology, based on the belief that life began with the Sirius star system and ancestral Nommo spirits (which appear in X-shaped bars across long rectangles that could be construed as amphibious creatures or humans).
The earliest dated piece is the 1981 painted steel sculpture “Black Diamond Mind.” The most recent, 2013-14’s painted cardboard “Star System.” They look like they could have been made the same year; the ideas behind them are that consistent. Harithas notes in his essay that Smith’s struggle to integrate his American ambition and his African roots “is more than a hallmark of his life’s work.”
A few of the works are on loan, including the Menil Collection’s “Spiral to the Next World,” but most came from the artist’s storage and the studio he shares with Kaneem. Thelma Smith, his wife (whom many Houstonians know as the front-desk greeter at the Menil Collection), said every time she and her daughter delve into the storage, they find something else he created they didn’t know existed. He is represented now by Nicole Longnecker Gallery, which helped Kaneem, Thelma and art league director-curator Jennie Ash organize the show.
I asked professor Alvia Wardlaw, who directs the University Museum at Texas Southern University, why she thought Smith hasn’t received more recognition. His commitment to teaching was probably one factor, she said. But she also believes his “real seriousness of purpose” with incorporating Dogon mysticism and astrology may have limited how others perceived him.
Years ago, she served on the selection panel when Smith competed for a commission to create a sculpture honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. at the University of Texas in Austin. He proposed an abstract, monumental work that would be as stark as Barnett Newman’s “Broken Obelisk.” “We got it, but we knew that was not what the university wanted,” Wardlaw said. “They wanted a statue of Dr. King.”
She knew then that he would remain loyal to his vision, “and the rest of us would have to catch up and understand, or not.” Regardless, she added, “There is a monumentality and a grandeur to his pieces that make them stand the test of time.”