Portland painter Arvie Smith on his Guggenheim Fellowship work

Portland artist Arvie Smith is known for colorful, larger-than-life oil paintings that explore oppression and injustice against Black Americans through symbolism and visual tropes. He’s also a professor emeritus at Pacific Northwest College of Art after a 35-year tenure. His murals can be seen on buildings in North Portland and at the Donald E. Long Juvenile Center, where he spent time teaching art to incarcerated youth.

Despite being in his mid-80s, Smith is far from retired — just last year, he received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. The work he created during that fellowship is currently on display in Chicago. Titled “Crossing Clear Creek,” the exhibit explores Smith’s childhood memories and experience of race in rural Texas and Los Angeles. Smith joins us to talk about his life and work.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Portland artist Arvie Smith is known for colorful, illusion-filled oil paintings that explore oppression and injustice against Black Americans, in addition to humor, resilience and joy. Smith’s work is in collections around the country and has been shown around the world. He’s 86 now. Last year, he received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. The work he created during that fellowship is currently on display at a gallery in Chicago. The show is called, “Crossing Clear Creek.” It explores Smith’s childhood memories and experiences in rural Texas and in Los Angeles.

Smith joins us now to talk about his life and his work. It is great to have you in the studio with me.

Arvie Smith: Thank you for having me.

Miller: You’ve had a long and celebrated career, part of a fancy biennales. And your work, as I noted, is in collections across the country. But I imagine getting a Guggenheim Fellowship stood out, that it was a big deal. What was it like to hear that you had won last year?

Smith: It’s probably the most important award or recognition that I’ve received during my career.

Miller: Wow.

Smith: I’ve received a number of awards.

Miller: You’ve got a book right there. Does it have your awards in it?

Smith: Well, yeah, kind of. I received the Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement, Joan Mitchell Award, Ford Family Foundation, and then the 2024 Guggenheim and an honorary PhD from Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Miller: But this is the one you say is the most significant for you.

Smith: It’s the most significant.

Miller: Why?

Smith: Well, the recognition, it is highly sought after. It’s the recognition that what I’m trying to say and what I am saying is important enough to receive that recognition.

Miller: The title of the show, as I noted earlier, is “Crossing Clear Creek.” What’s Clear Creek?

Smith: My first formative years were in the South – in East Texas, actually. It was a small rural community, and it separated Blacks from whites. In order to get from the white neighborhood or from the Black neighborhood, you had to cross Clear Creek, so that was my inspiration for the piece. It was a metaphor for the transition from not only crossing Clear Creek from the Black community to the white, but my family made that second migration from the South to the West. My mother had gone to Los Angeles. So it’s a metaphor for not only crossing the river to the white side of town, but I’m talking about crossing that void, crossing that river between a life of segregated Jim Crow laws and etiquettes to South Central Los Angeles.

Miller: As you’re describing it, I’m hearing it is both metaphorical and very real. This was a real place. What is one of your memories of the creek itself, of crossing the creek in reality?

Smith: In reality? My grandfather was a school teacher. He founded the school for Black children and my grandmother was a school teacher, so they both taught.

Miller: The school where you went?

Smith: Where I went, right. So “Crossing Clear Creek” actually has to do with one time … The creek often washed out. I mean, it was almost a river. It would wash out. And one time we were coming back from the Black side of town. My family owned a lot of property, so we lived across Clear Creek over in the white community. The car broke down and there was no way to get across Clear Creek. We were sitting in the car, my brother, sister and I, and the water is rising. And my grandfather said, you guys have to wait here and I’ll go get help.

He wasn’t able to get any help, so he came back and we walked across the bridge. It was probably knee deep. We walked across the bridge. He carried my little brother, but it was one of those memories that you don’t forget. The water’s rising up, you’re sitting in the backseat. The water’s rising up and you’re a kid. And you don’t know exactly what to do. So it was pretty traumatic.

Miller: How were you able to live on the white side of town in the Jim Crow South?

Smith: We lived up on the hill and it was rural. There weren’t any houses. It was a big farm. In fact, my grandfather and his brother owned farms next to each other. The Ku Klux Klan had burnt down my great uncle’s house and that was our playground. They had little bricks that they built the chimneys with and those were our little toys.

Miller: The bricks that were left after the house burned down?

Smith: Right, right.

Miller: That was where you played?

Smith: Right.

Miller: In a press release for the new show, it says that, “at 86 years old, Smith has made the courageous shift from public to personal.” I was intrigued by that sentence because when I’ve looked at your work over the years, I find it hard to disentangle the public and the personal. A lot of it seems intensely personal, but does it ring true to you? Is there something more autobiographical about your latest work than the work that’s come before?

Smith: It is. The autobiographical part is when I’m talking about the actual activities and how I felt about those activities, the moving to Los Angeles and moving from a rural quiet community to Los Angeles …

Miller: A bustling city.

Smith: A bustling city, and very strange to me and my siblings.

Miller: You rode horses and you were a country boy.

Smith: Right, right. And that’s how I was identified, as a country boy.

Miller: They called you that?

Smith: Oh yeah, I had the straw sticking out of my mouth, the whole thing.

Miller: Did you feel like an outsider when you arrived? I imagine this was a very Black neighborhood, but you weren’t the only person who would come. This was part of the great migration. So people were coming, I imagine, all the time from Georgia, Texas or wherever.

Smith: Right.

Miller: But did you feel like an outsider when you arrived?

Smith: I felt very much like an outsider. I didn’t know, I wasn’t familiar with the mores of living in the city. I’d never been in a city before.

Miller: Was it exciting?

Smith: It was exciting, but it’s scary. It was scary because you had to negotiate that society, that culture that you were not familiar with. I’d never seen a fight in my life and there it was a [not] matter of joining a gang. It was, which gang were you going to join? And I was a big kid for 10 years old.

Miller: Which gang did you join?

Smith :[Laughter] It was called the Yellow Jackets.

Miller: But as you said, you didn’t want to. But you had no choice, it seems like.

Smith: You didn’t. I guess my brother avoided that and I was kind of his protector. So, he avoided that.

Miller: Because you hadn’t in a sense,

Smith: Yeah.

Miller: Why is it that you turned now, in your mid-80s, to more autobiographical work.

Smith: Well, actually, I’ve done that pretty much all my life, of not only what I see but a lot of what I felt. Let me start from the beginning. I’d done a copper tooling for my grandmother and my great grandmother – she was born in slavery. But she took a real interest in me. I was kind of a clumsy kid, so she took a real interest in me. I gave her this copper tooling on my horse. And she really loved that.

Miller: And you got that commendation.

Smith: I got that commendation and I said, hm, I really like this.

Miller: It’s like the classic stories of comedians saying, like, “I said a joke in 3rd grade, the class laughed. I loved that feeling and I wanted more of it.”

Smith: Exactly.

Miller: But for you, it was making art.

Smith: I was making art. I continued making art when I got to Los Angeles. In high school or grade school, I considered myself the artist of the school. I thought I was pretty good. But all of my friends in high school were all football players and basketball players. These guys got scholarships and I thought, well, I’ll get a scholarship, too, as an artist. But you don’t get those kinds of scholarships in ghetto schools. So that was disappointing.

I wasn’t deterred after high school. I said, I’ll try to go to art school. In high school, as I said, I thought I was the best. But there was this kid and he had gone to art school. He would come into the class, oh, maybe once or twice a month and work with us, draw with us. And this kid was incredible and I’m saying, what is art school? What is that?

After high school, I went to the art school in town, the only art school, and I didn’t get very far at the reception. I walked in. I didn’t know what I was doing. I walked in the door and I was going to explain that I want to know how to enroll in art school. And the receptionist said, well, we don’t need your kind here.

That really threw me. And 23 years later, I applied again at Pacific Northwest College of Art. But that was very detrimental. It was something that you just don’t forget.

Miller: Did that disappointment, that denial, work its way into your art?

Smith: It worked its way into my life.

Miller: Is there a difference?

Smith: [Laughter] Not really. I try not to censor myself too much about my art. So in that respect, it’s all me. It’s all coming from me and sometimes I try to make it a little more interesting, you know.

Miller: One of the things that I really admire about your style is the contrasts within a single canvas – super vibrant colors, really dark themes, humor and horror. There’s a sense of terror that I feel in so many of your paintings, a grinning white face that seems like the smile is just a thin veneer on top of potential violence. There’s just a sort of sugar with the medicine. What attracts you to these contrasts? I mean, what I’m describing, it exists within one canvas. And in most of your paintings, it’s not just one thing, it’s all kinds of emotions all together.

Smith: It’s a number of emotions and a number of scenarios within a single pane.

Miller: Abundance.

Smith: Abundance.

Miller: Why?

Smith: Because I have so much to say. I have an idea. But once I start painting, the painting takes over and all of these things enter into the work. I try not to paint them out, unless it’s somehow not working – and that’s generally not the case. Generally, what I put down might get painted over, but I don’t erase it. That’s part of who I am. Some of the things are underneath and I’m trying to find those things with my art.

Miller: Another thing I love about your work is the hands. They’re like bodies in their own right. They are elongated, often powerful, full of life. What interests you in hands, in particular?

Smith: First of all, they’re difficult to draw, but what really interests me is that hands are, I think, more expressive than the face. You can say so much with your hands, and often people talk with their hands.

Miller: You’re doing it right now.

Smith: I’m doing it right now

Miller: With your beautiful hands. What makes them hard to paint? And AI would agree with you. Maybe AI has gotten better, but famously, in the last couple of years, AI can do amazing things and then it thinks that people have three fingers or six fingers. It can’t do hands, but it seems like human painters find it challenging as well. What’s hard about painting a hand?

Smith: Well, you have to study … the hand can do so many things. So you have to understand the anatomy of the hand, then what it can do and how you can use that to say what you’re trying to say within the piece. So, I pride myself on my draftsmanship. That’s something that I know a lot of artists struggle with.

Miller: Meaning, the craft of drawing, the craft of “have I captured what I want …” in a way that maybe it’s not photorealistic, but that says something that I wanted to say?

Smith: Yes, I try not to go for the photorealistic. I studied photography, I could do that, but …

Miller: That’s not what painting is for you.

Smith: It’s not. Painting, for me, is expression. And I can express a lot of emotion within how I manipulate those hands and faces, too, for that matter.

Miller: Earlier, when you were talking about why the Guggenheim meant so much to you, I don’t remember the exact wording, but essentially it was that this was a recognition that people really care about and value, and understand the work you’ve been doing for your life and want to help you make more of it. Have you seen the perception of your work change in recent decades? I guess I’m wondering, in particular, as conversations about race in our country have changed in fits and starts.

Smith: It’s changed, but it kind of stays the same.

Miller: You’ve described it as a carousel and there’s a carousel in your in in some of your recent work. What has stayed the same?

Smith: Right. If I can relate a story from when I lived in the rural South … My grandfather had the only car and he would take us into town. One time, we drove down to the gas station because we were going into town. The gas station guy, a white man, called my grandfather “boy.” I said, “Grandpa, why didn’t you say something to him?” And he said, “Son, the laws don’t protect us here.” That’s here today, that selective policing. That racially-selective policing is still here.

Miller: You are 86 years old now. What advice would you give to your 46-year-old self?

Smith: Work harder.

Miller: Really? I mean, but you’ve accomplished so much. The only reason I’m surprised by that is, often when I’ve heard people ask that question of people who are your age, the answer is, “relax a little bit, enjoy what you have.” But no, you’re hard on yourself. Work harder.

Smith: I’m still hard on myself. I work harder. When I take on a project, I work with a theme. And often that theme is social justice, racial justice and variations on that theme. So working with that, I’m doing research, I’m looking into … I want to really understand what it is I’m trying to say. So a lot of research is involved. Then I come back informed with what I’m thinking about and then advance to the painting.

Miller: OK, I’m realizing now, I’m taking away from painting. So I’m going to thank you from the bottom of my heart and say, get back to work and congratulations.

[Laughter]

Smith: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Miller: It’s Arvie Smith, a Portland-based painter for decades now. Last year, at the age of 85, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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