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| Identifier | LandscapNo1HughieLeeSmith |
| Title | Landscape #1 |
| Subject | Karamu House
Works Progress Administration (U.S.)
African Americans
Artists
|
| Description | Hughie Lee-Smith (1915-1999) was born in Florida and moved to Cleveland at age 10. After finishing high school in 1934, Lee-Smith won a scholarship from the Scholastic Awards exhibition held at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute, which enabled him to study at the Detroit Institute of Arts and Crafts for a year. The following year he received a full scholarship from the Gilpin Players acting troupe of Cleveland's Karamu House—a settlement house in Cleveland's Fairfax neighborhood devoted to serving the educational and cultural needs of the surrounding black community—and pursued a degree at the Cleveland School of Art. The importance of Lee-Smith's association with Karamu House extended beyond his being able to finance his education. A condition of the scholarship was that recipients spend a year teaching at the settlement, and in 1935, Lee-Smith and fellow Cleveland artists Elmer Brown and Charles Sallée co-founded the Cleveland Karamu House Artist Association. Karamu House was also home to the nation's first African American theater company, and Lee-Smith—whose passion for the arts extended to dance, music, literature, and theater—was surrounded by the theatrical elements that, like the carnival, would play a significant role in his later paintings. His early work reflected social concerns inspired by the Great Depression of the 1930s and the work of Works Progress Administration artists of the period. Lee-Smith was employed by the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)in Ohio. In 1938, Lee-Smith graduated with honors from the Cleveland School of Art (now called the Cleveland Institute of Art) and received a Bachelor of Arts from Wayne State University in Detroit in 1953. Like many WPA artists, Lee-Smith was concerned about the contribution art could make to the struggle for social justice and racial equality, and he created a series of lithographs on this theme. |
| Creator | Lee-Smith, Hughie |
| Location Depicted | Fairfax (Cleveland, Ohio)
|
| Time Period | Post-Industrial: 1930-1959
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| Date Original | n.d. |
| Object Type | linocuts
|
| Donor | Russell and Rowena Jelliffe
|
| Collection | Russell and Rowena Jelliffe Collection
|
| Repository | Cleveland State University. Michael Schwartz Library. Special Collections. |
| Repository Collection | Russell and Rowena Jelliffe Collection |
| Repository Homepage | http://web.ulib.csuohio.edu/SpecColl/ |
| Digital Publisher | Cleveland Memory Project |
| Copyright | http://www.clevelandmemory.org/copyright/ |
| Format | jpeg
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| Digital Processing Notes | TIF File Size: 28,240 k - DPI: 300 |
| Encyclopedia of Cleveland History Entry | http://ech.case.edu/ech-cgi/article.pl?id=KH |
| Further Reading | http://scholar.csuohio.edu/record=b2552889~S0 |
