Dr. Charles Smith

New Orleans, Louisiana, 1940 -

BiographyDr. Charles is self-taught as an artist, and self-designated as a ‘Doctor’ – a title he adopted to better communicate the “elevated level of wisdom” that he has garnered from his life experiences. Dr. Charles is an ordained minister and a veteran, he has worked as a community organizer, a social worker, an educator, an archivist, and as an orator: experiences that continue to inform and shape his identity as an artist and activist. Since the mid-1980s, initially in Aurora, Illinois, and more recently in Hammond, Louisiana, Dr. Charles Smith has created one of the most remarkable sculptural projects of the past forty years.

Charles Smith was born in 1940 in New Orleans and relocated with his mother and siblings, following the death of his father, to Chicago in the mid-1950s. In 1955 Smith’s mother took her children to pay their respects at the funeral of Emmett Till, an experience that would have a profound effect on the young Smith, one that would impact upon his subsequent development and determination as an artist. In 1966 Smith was drafted into the U.S. Marine Corps, and he served for two years as an infantryman in Vietnam before being honorably discharged in 1968. His experiences in Vietnam left him with physical, psychological, and spiritual wounds that resulted in his suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In 1986 Dr. Smith purchased a property in Aurora, Illinois, where he initially created a commemorative sculpture of a friend who had died in Vietnam. Over the ensuing fifteen years he continued to make figurative sculptures in Aurora, and by the time he left for Louisiana in 2000, he had created more than six hundred individual works, transforming his home and yard into an all-encompassing, site-specific sculptural environment commemorating “African American history, from slavery to the present.” He named the Aurora site the “African-American Heritage Museum + Black Veterans’ Archive.” (More than two hundred of the sculptures from the Aurora site subsequently entered the collection of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.) In Hammond, Louisiana, starting in 2001, Dr. Charles initiated the second iteration of the “African-American Heritage Museum + Black Veterans’ Archive”, which remains active to this day. Created within the context of his properties, Dr. Smith’s site-specific environments in Aurora and Hammond were ultimately not directed towards mainstream art audiences, instead Dr. Smith considered them as “gifts” to their respective communities. As an artist, archivist, activist and educator, Dr. Charles views the narratives of African American history and the African American experience as the constantly unfolding subject of his lifetime’s work. In his work Dr. Smith commemorates the lives of celebrated Black public figures such as George Washington Carver and Malcolm X whilst simultaneously elevating the lives and experiences of his friends and neighbors, the individuals in his community who are fighting for change. As a statement on Dr. Charles’ website suggests, his work is ultimately an “expression of his profound commitment to righting history, teaching social justice and preaching anti-racism.”

(https://whitecolumns.org/exhibitions/dr-charles-smith/)

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