BAIA BITS

Little Moments Where Knowledge Meets Art

In 1952, a very talented worker walked away from his position at a New York post office. After all, the 33-year-old had just witnessed a Paul Cézanne exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art with a fellow artist, and the show had triggered him to devote the remainder of his life to his true passion, his art.

Fortunately, for the rest of us, painter, printmaker, and teacher, Vincent DaCosta Smith, did just that. Born in Brooklyn in 1929 to Bajan immigrants, Smith dabbled in art while attending high school, working parttime, and studying piano and the alto sax. At 17, he joined the army and traveled with his brigade before returning and taking up painting and printmaking. Smith was hired at a local post office at age 22 where he would befriend fellow artist, Tom Boutis, the one who would take him to the Cézanne exhibit a decade later.

After the pivotal exhibit, Smith studied at the Art Students League in 1953 and attended classes at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. At this time, his paintings were influenced by both German Expressionism and local urbanity, given the rich New York nightlife and jazz clubs surrounding him in his native Brooklyn and nearby in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and Lower East Side. One product of this phase was Smith’s popular “Street Scene” from his 1954 Saturday Night in Harlem series. His work would soon earn him several scholarships, one to the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

Vincent Smith. “Jonkonnu Festival,” enhanced lithograph

In the mid-1960s, after his years of figurative work had been marginalized by the New York art scene’s focus on abstract expressionism, Smith took the lead from Romare Bearden’s pioneering use of collage and painted “The Voices Are Stilled” which depicted a street scene with the storefront office of the Congress of Racial Equality (C.O.R.E.). Similar to Bearden and his prominent artist collective, Spiral, Smith engaged with the Black Arts Movement, using his art to advance the cause of civil rights and relevant political organizations like C.O.R.E.

Smith began teaching art in 1967 and, for decades, taught at the Whitney Museum’s Art Resource Center and at the Center for Art and Culture of Bedford Stuyvesant. His work was showcased in numerous solo and group exhibits and in the collections of many major museums up through his December 2003 death at age 74.

Of his work, Vincent DaCosta Smith once offered the following: “My approach has always been very spontaneous and sort of inventive, instinctive, intuitive—I tend to refer to whatever I am doing as an orchestration. I may be working with seven or eight ingredients at the same time—oil and sand, dry pigment and collage, and pebbles and dirt and so forth. To control all of these elements, all of these things have to work together in a certain way so that when the finished product is presented, it makes sense. When I hit, I’m like a conductor.”

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Stephanie Robinson, Esq. is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, a national media figure, author, former Chief Counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and former President and CEO of The Jamestown Project, a national think tank focusing on democracy. Ms. Robinson hosted her own national radio show, Roundtable with Stephanie Robinson, a popular weekly 30-minute, talk-radio program focused on culture, politics, and relationships that aired on TSN. For over half a decade, Ms. Robinson was Political and Social Commentator for the Tom Joyner Morning Show where she spoke to between 9 and 10 million people weekly, offering her perspective on the day’s most pressing social and political issues.

Robinson is co-author of Accountable: Making America as Good as Its Promise, (Atria Books, 2009). She is a nationally recognized expert on issues relating to social policy, women, race, family, and electoral politics. She was featured as one of the 30 Young Leaders of the Future in Ebony Magazine and was profiled in the book As I Am: Young African American Women in a Critical Age, by Julian Okwu. Robinson is a frequent speaker expressing her views in countless media outlets including the Associated Press, The Washington Post, C-Span, Fox News, NewsOne and NPR.

Stephanie was a Member of President Clinton’s first Mission to Africa regarding children orphaned by AIDS. Robinson, a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Maryland and the Harvard Law School, is a native of Steubenville, Ohio. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two sons.

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