William E. Smith

William "Skinny" Elijah Smith (1913–1997) was an African-American artist who was recognized for exploring Black experiences in his art. Friend and poet Langston Hughes once described Smith's work as the "humor and pathos of Negro life captured in line and color".

Early life and education William E. Smith was born in 1913 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Shortly after the death of his mother, Smith moved to Cleveland, Ohio in 1927 along with his two younger siblings, to join his father. As a result of his father's opposition to his artistic aspirations, Smith left home in 1932, where he learned about the hardships and struggles of everyday life in Cleveland. the Cleveland School of Art (today known as the Cleveland Institute of Art) and the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. A lithographer trained at the Carnegie Institute of Art and The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, Beatty served as Smith's mentor affording him the opportunity to explore the various techniques and styles of printmaking.

Having designed numerous stage sets and posters and produced more than 30 costume designs at Karamu House, the most notable being his costume designs for Shirley Graham Du Bois' opera, Tom Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro (1932). Smith was awarded a five-year Gilpin Scholarship to attend the John Huntington Polytechnic Institute from academic years 1935 to 1940. In the early 1970s, Smith continued to pursue art by publishing illustrations of subjects from African-American history for Cleveland's New Day Press. Howard University, Washington, D.C. Karamu House, Cleveland, Ohio Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Oakland Museum, Oakland, California The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Selected works