In Search of Validation

When the curatorial director, Faheem Majeed, invited my wife, Rose J. Smith, and myself, Melvin R. Smith, to exhibit our artwork in the Bronzeville area South Side Community Art Center, we were thrilled. In exhibiting our work in the same place that African-American art luminaries such as Archibald Motley, Charles White, Gordon Parks, and Elizabeth Catlett have is a crowning achievement for us.

We have never had the opportunity to show our work in the two traditional major African-American cultural centers such as the Bronzeville South Side areas of Chicago or the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Our New York exhibitions were in midtown on 57th Street, Central Park West, and Broadway.

History has informed us that Harlem, New York, and the South Side of Chicago have been the fertile sources, touchstones, and nurturers of African-American culture. As artists, we are in search of what William H. Johnson, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, Archibald Motley, and Elizabeth Catlett have received from these two African-American communities...."validation".

As the ultimate African-American communities, they served to reveal these artists for what they were ...transcenders of the culture. It was from within these communities where they have gained authority and, in a circle of validation, were in empowered by the authentic culture from whence they came. The culture's values and inventions are being celebrated in excellent fashion by the art that these artists have since produced.

Therfore, we consider our exhibition at the South Side Community Art Center to be a singal event, an act of bearing witness. It is, in the tradition of the African American culture, a homecoming in search of validation.

- Melvin R. Smith