Lee-Smith was born in
Eustis, Florida, to Luther and Alice Williams Smith; in art school he altered his last name to sound more distinguished. Shortly after his birth, Lee-Smith's parents divorced and his mother moved to
Cleveland, Ohio, to pursue a music career. As a child, Lee-Smith moved to
Atlanta to live with his grandmother. She was strict with Lee-Smith, and when carnivals came to town she would not allow him to attend, an event which he describes as an experience which "must have sunk into my unconscious and manifested itself years later in my paintings: the balloons, ribbons, pennants." At the age of 10, he moved to Cleveland to live with his mother and grandmother (once his mother had established her music career), and attended classes at the
Cleveland Museum of Art, and later the
Cleveland Institute of Art and the John Huntington Polytechnic Institute, the
Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts & Crafts (Center For Creative Studies, College of Art & Design)and Wayne State University (BA 1953). Lee-Smith attended East Technical High School (where he was president of the art club and ran track with Jesse Owens), during the tenure of
Harold Hunsicker as head of its art department. As a youth, Lee-Smith was active at
Karamu as a dancer, performer, studio enrollee, and teacher trainee. In 1938, he graduated with honors from the Cleveland School of Art and worked for the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). 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. Lee-Smith's “The Artist’s Life No.1”, a 1939 lithograph, is one of his early masterpieces. It featured in an exhibition called
Hardship to Hope: African American Art from the Karamu Workshop at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2929 Richmond Road,
Beachwood, Ohio. Lee-Smith's first job as an art teacher was at
Claflin College in
Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 1940. Newly married to Mabel Louise Everett, Lee-Smith returned with his wife to Orangeburg. The pay was so poor for a man with a new bride that Lee-Smith gave up and moved to
Detroit. He got a job as a core maker in one of Henry Ford's factories. He worked there for about three years before joining the Navy for a 19-month stint. Stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center north of Chicago, Lee-Smith was one of three African-American artists commissioned to do “morale-building paintings” of Blacks in the Navy. While in the
Navy, he painted a
mural entitled
History of the Negro in the U.S. Navy. He also did portraits of the first Black naval officers. Lee-Smith and Mabel Louise Everett divorced in 1953. Although the divorce was amicable, it had a “deathlike” impact on Lee-Smith. After his long journey and hard work, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Art Education (graduating in 1953) from
Wayne State University in Detroit. Many years after winning a top prize for painting from the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1953, he recalled: I was no longer called black artist, Negro artist, colored boy. When I won that prize, all of a sudden, there was no longer a racial designation. Later he moved to
Cranbury, New Jersey. His paintings evidenced the influence of
Cubism,
Social realism, and
Surrealism at the service of a personal expression that was poignant and enigmatic. In 1994, he was commissioned to paint the official portrait of
David Dinkins, former
Mayor of New York City, for the
New York City Hall. Lee-Smith met Patricia Thomas-Ferry, a student at the Art Students League, in the spring of 1978. Late that year, they rented an apartment near the League, and they married a few days before Christmas. This third marriage would be happy and lasting, and the couple would make their home in New Jersey in 1981. In 1999, Lee-Smith died of cancer in
Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was 83. ==Works==