Harold Smith

Harold Smith is an educator and multimedia artist who lives and works in the Kansas City area. Most of his work is focused on his experience within the American black experience.

Honors: Vivian Wilson Bluett

“I was terrified. I was nervous and anxious about the details. As nervous and anxious as I was, I wasn’t going to turn down the project. I felt like I had a responsibility to the community to give a visual representation of our struggle,” said Vivian Wilson Bluett.

January 19, 2021
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Arts News: Jazz Age Lives on at Lonnie’s Reno Club

Sometimes, it seems that history is made when ingenuity, adversity and art intersect. At the beginning of the 1930s, during the early years of the Great Depression, Kansas City continued to work. Thomas Pendergast, the legendary mayor/mobster, allowed jazz clubs to openly sell alcohol despite prohibition. Kansas City became known as “Paris of the Plains.” […]

January 6, 2021
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“London Williams & Izsys Archer: In Truth, Black Angels,” Haw Contemporary

The riveting installation “London Williams & Izsys Archer: In Truth, Black Angels” at Haw Contemporary in the West Bottoms is angelic by virtue of its emotional accessibility and vulnerability. At the same time, it stirs “good trouble” by inviting the viewer to engage in its dialogue on the overlapping issues of race, gender, sexuality and […]

January 5, 2021
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“Sheila Pree Bright: #1960Now,” Outside FADS Building, Johnson County Community College

“Dr. King’s policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for […]

November 6, 2020
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Kemper Museum Presents Dawoud Bey Photographs from the Bill and Christy Gautreaux Collection

It is supremely fitting that the last few lines of celebrated Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes’ poem “Dreams” provides the inspiration for the title of “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” a body of work of profound significance by renowned Chicago-based photographer Dawoud Bey.

November 3, 2020
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“Real Black: A spectrum of the Black present,” UMKC Gallery of Art

I’m not real, I’m just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real, if you were you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So we are both myths.” —Sun Ra While Sun-Ra claimed to be from Saturn and passed […]

October 27, 2020
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