At 85 years of age, Arvie Smith is arguably in his finest form ever. The artist retired from teaching in 2014, which allowed him focus on his art full-time, and after that followed a 2017 Governor’s Art Award from the state of Oregon, a 2018 honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the Pacific Northwest School of Art, and a showing at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Now he is taking on New York: Smith recently exhibited in the US art capital for the first time as a part of the Art Dealers Association of America’s annual art show. “I’m flexing my muscles for sure,” he said, while discussing his work during a break in the action. “I want to engage and create a dialogue with the audience, a dialogue about the experience of Black people, the Black experience.”
True to those intentions, Smith’s painting draws deeply on his experiences as a Black man. Raised in east Texas in the 1940s, he lived in a world where the impacts of slavery and lynchings were still very much felt. “Many of the lessons I was taught were related to the proper social norms designed by Jim Crow laws dictating how Blacks should conduct themselves with deference to whites for their own safety,” he said. During Smith’s childhood, the Ku Klux Klan burned down his great-uncle’s house, which was adjacent to his grandparents’ house, where Smith was raised. “My great-uncle ‘hopped a freight’ out of the county to save his own life,” he said.
