Art Smith, Premier Modernist African-American Jewelry Designer

Art Smith, born in Cuba in 1917 to Jamaican parents in Cuba. His family settled in Brooklyn in 1920 and Smith showed artistic talent at an early age. Encouraged to apply to art school, he received a scholarship to Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. There he was one of only a handful of black students, and his advisors tried to steer him towards architecture, suggesting he might readily find a job in the civil sector of that profession. His lack of proclivity for mathematics eventually forced him to abandon this path, however, and he turned to commercial art and a major in sculpture, training that would prove invaluable.

Trained at Cooper Union, Art Smith opened his first shop on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village in 1946. One of the leading modernist jewelers of the mid-twentieth century, Smith was also an active supporter of black and gay civil rights, an avid jazz enthusiast, and a supporter of early black modern dance groups.

He also took a night course in jewelry making at New York University. That and the friendship with Winifred Mason, a black jewelry designer who became his mentor, set him on the course of his adult artistic life. 

Mason had a small jewelry studio and store in Greenwich Village, and Smith became her full time assistant. He subsequently moved from Brooklyn to the Village’s Bank Street. In 1946, Smith opened his own studio and shop on Cornelia Street in the village. But after suffering racial violence in this Italian neighborhood, he soon moved to 140 West Fourth Street just 1/2 block from Washington Square Park, the heart of Greenwich Village where as an openly gay black artist he felt more at home. The new store was better located business-wise and socially, and Smith’s career began to take off.

He began to also sell wholesale to boutiques around the country. Also, he became acquainted with some of the city’s leading black artists including writer James Baldwin, composer and pianist Billy Strayhorn, singers Lena Horne and Harry Belfonte, actor Brock Peters, and expressionist painter Charles Sebree. In the early 1960s, Smith received a commission from the NAACP in 1975 to design a brooch for First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Inspired by surrealism, biomorphicism, and primitivism, Art Smith’s jewelry is dynamic in its size and form. Although sometimes massive in scale, his jewelry remains lightweight and wearable. 

Visit his long-term installation at the Brooklyn Museum; From The Village to Vogue.  Visit his website to learn more about this legendary artisan/designer.

Art Smith (American, born in Cuba, 1917-1982), fashioned modernist pieces from simple metals that achieved new expressions in shape and form.
Visual resonance can be detected between pieces of Smith’s and the works of artists associated with modernist abstraction,
- See more at: http://www.cooperhewitt.org/object-of-the-day/2014/02/03/art-metal-modernist-jewelry-greenwich-village%E2%80%99s-art-smith?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Cooper-hewittObjectOfTheDay+%28Cooper-Hewitt%27s+Object+of+the+Day%29#sthash.Bap2WqQG.dpuf

Art Smith (American, born in Cuba, 1917-1982), fashioned modernist pieces from simple metals that achieved new expressions in shape and form.
Visual resonance can be detected between pieces of Smith’s and the works of artists associated with modernist abstraction,
- See more at: http://www.cooperhewitt.org/object-of-the-day/2014/02/03/art-metal-modernist-jewelry-greenwich-village%E2%80%99s-art-smith?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Cooper-hewittObjectOfTheDay+%28Cooper-Hewitt%27s+Object+of+the+Day%29#sthash.Bap2WqQG.dpuf