Arvie Smith: Crossing Clear Creek
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 8, 4-7pm
moniquemeloche is pleased to present Arvie Smith: Crossing Clear Creek, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Smith is a 2024 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, with an artistic career spanning over four decades. His ongoing passion for advancing social and racial justice is reflected through his narrative paintings depicting historical and contemporary policies, influencers, bigotry, and institutional white supremacy, transforming the history of oppressed and stereotyped segments of the American experience into lyrical two-dimensional master works. While the works’ emotional rage, burden and determination are expressed through movement, color and sound, Smith has historically shelved his own underlying agony, revelations and the impact of living in Black skin – an element at the core of his work that has been rarely disclosed until now. At 86 years old, Smith has made the courageous shift from public to personal, bringing his own history into dialogue with the current conditions.
Crossing Clear Creek presents an autobiographical body of work that portrays a significant time in the artist’s life, revealing memories of events and emotions he experienced during his youth during his migration from Jim Crow-era rural Texas to South Central Los Angeles, a city laden with violent crime and gang activity that would become the center of the Civil Rights Movement. Here, Smith shapes an intimate journey of identity, resolve and deliverance, a story he has never shared or acknowledged in its entirety. This new personal narrative led Smith to receiving the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, a mark of distinction that emphasizes the importance of the recipient's unique vision and artistic voice, serving as the impetus for his solo exhibition.
The exhibition’s title Crossing Clear Creek is explicit and metaphoric. Clear Creek, a body of water that runs through Roganville, Texas–Smith’s hometown–must be crossed in order to travel from the “Black side of town to the white.” Grounding the exhibition, Smith’s massive two-part painting of the same name presents hopeful crossers on horseback pulling a chariot, eyes forward toward the winding path of a perceived better future as symbolized by a large white castle in the distance. Metaphorically, Smith addresses the state of the country and how the shifts in systems and policies affect people's lives. His subjects are women and people of color, representing the marginalized groups who become pawns, creating tension and uncertainty as the ruling leaders play the cynical game of give and take. For the artist, Crossing Clear Creek symbolizes the transition of himself and his siblings from their early years in the South to a land where the promise of better times remained elusive.
Art has been an ever-present facet of the artist’s life. From copying Michelangelo’s Renaissance masterpiecesin his grandfather’s single room elementary school in Roganville, to becoming the self-proclaimed “school artist” at his high school in Los Angeles, to being dissuaded from applying to art school by a racist receptionist, Smith reflects that his early development in art ran parallel with his formation as a Black citizen—"as a child, I understood that the Black man's life is disposable; as an adult, I understood that I could use art as a means of comprehending and explaining what it is like to be a person of color in America…The recognition conferred on me by the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts is the most meaningful artistic honor of my lifetime. This acknowledgement and support led me to create this body of work. I embarked on this exhibition with a heightened sense of significance and purpose.”
Smith’s work will be included in the forthcoming group exhibition When Langston Hughes Came to Town at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV which opens May 2025, and this summer he will participate in the Baltimore Museum of Art x Sherman Family Foundation Residency in Camden, Maine, which was founded in 2024.
