Vincent DaCosta. Smith was a painter and printmaker celebrated for his bold depictions of African American life, especially the vitality and struggle of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant community, where he lived and worked for most of his career. His raw, expressive style, marked by jagged lines, rich textures, and symbolic compositions, captures both the beauty and the turbulence of Black experience in mid-20th-century America.

Born in Brooklyn, Smith was largely self-taught. After serving in the U.S. Army and studying at the Art Students League and Brooklyn Museum Art School, he found inspiration in the expressive realism of artists like Jacob Lawrence and Charles White, as well as in the social documentary photography of Roy DeCarava. He brought this influence into a language entirely his own, fusing Cubist structure, African sculpture, and the improvisational energy of jazz into a visual rhythm that mirrored urban life.

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Smith’s work grew increasingly political. His prints and paintings chronicled scenes of street protests, crowded barrooms, and inner-city rituals. In works like Jubilee and The Scream (1965), he combined biblical and mythological imagery with the contemporary realities of racial injustice, transforming personal experience into collective testimony.

Smith was also an educator and advocate, co-founding the Centennial Art Gallery in Brooklyn in 1966, an important exhibition space for Black artists during the civil rights era. He exhibited nationally and internationally, with major solo shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Mississippi Museum of Art.

His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Studio Museum in Harlem, among others.

Vincent Smith’s art reflects the improvisational pulse of the city and the resilience of its people. Whether etched in black and white or painted in rich, saturated color, his images insist on the complexity of Black life, spiritual, political, and unyieldingly alive.

Selected Exhibitions

VINCENT SMITH, Brooklyn Museum School Gallery, NY, 1955

Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, 1970

Contemporary Black Artists in America, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, 1971

VINCENT SMITH, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 1973

VINCENT D. SMITH: Drawings and Paintings, Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, 1974

Amistad II: Afro-American Art, Fisk University, Department of Art, Nashville, TN, 1975

VINCENT D. SMITH: Paintings and Drawings, Erie Art Museum, PA, 1975

VINCENT SMITH: Oils, Drawings, Prints, Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY, 1977

VINCENT SMITH: Works on Paper 1964-1983, Center for Art and Culture of Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, NY, 1981

Tradition and Conflict: Images of a Turbulent Decade 1963-1973, Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, 1985

VINCENT D. SMITH: Retrospective (1965-1991), G.R. N'Namdi Gallery, Birmingham, MI, 1991

African Affinities/Expressionist Essences: VINCENT SMITH's Eight Etchings, 1965-1966, David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, IL, 1997

Narratives of African American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection, University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, MD, 1998

Dreams, Myths, and Realities: A Vincent Smith Retrospective, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 2001

Successions: Prints by African-American Artists from the Jean and Robert Steele Collection, University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, MD, 2002

A Century of Collecting: African American Art in the Art Institute of Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, IL, 2003

Full Spectrum: Prints from the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA, 2012

Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints: Revolution, Resistance, and Activism, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, 2022