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IMAMU AMIRI BARAKA

If Vincent Smith would tell you how old he is you could say whether or not he is an old or young master. He is a Master, of craft and expression, as they are ineluctably harmonized in true creative motion. Vincent Smith's is an art of the depth- an art of the black signaling depth, openly stating its cultural parameters, but not as limitation but as standard, against which to measure the atomic magnitude of emotional diversity that shapes the world. Brothers stand and stare, Sisters smile a little, buildings hang stiff in Smith-Space, Flowers glow indelibly into the consciousness, civil rights leaders and militants are caught in paint like fixed artifacts of the black creative aesthetic, their politics collected forever in colors and forms. 

The most arresting aspect of Smith's work is his high blood sense of color. Everything he points out is color. Clothes, faces, streets, skies, suns. Canvasses bathed in reds, yellows, bright oranges. And it is this color, even in prints, that sets his work apart, yet connects it to the Afrikan Personality, and the traditional use and appreciation of color in all Black art. A tradition as broad as Jake Lawrence or the exteriors of Sudanese dwellings. The contemporary scenes Smith constructs hold a stillness about them as real and as solemn as the masks and statuary of the Afrikan Continent. These faces are the masks and statues of the Afrikan in America. Smith's art itself is part of the reconstruction of Afrikan culture in the west, alive yet permanent, constantly evolving, yet unified and collective, it is an art that demands depth from us to go beyond the beauty of the colors the science of the forms, into the defining tone the poet-painter creates as the underlying Free Black Soul communication of his work. All Smith's work says Look Inside!

Imamu Amiri Baraka
januari 1973