Arvie Smith '85

— PNCA Alumni and Faculty —

On a warm Friday morning at the Beppu Wiarda Gallery in Portland’s Pearl District, Arvie Smith is waxing nostalgic about the moment he knew he was an artist.

“I was growing up in Texas and we had horses,” says the 1985 PNCA graduate. “And once I did a copper tooling of my horse for my grandma. She loved it and I thought, ‘Wow, you can really get attention for this stuff!’ After that, I always knew I would be an artist. It was just too fun.”

Slightly overdressed for the humid late-May weather in a black blazer, black jeans, black turtleneck and wide-brimmed hat, Smith, 67, has a twinkle in his eye when he remembers his childhood foray into to the artistic process; a process, he says, his parents encouraged. Well, mostly encouraged.

“I remember my mom saying, ‘Well, I’ll send you to art school. But how are you going to make a living?” says Smith, laughing. “She knew even back then how hard the artist’s life would be. I’m sort of glad I waited until I was older to do it.”

Smith says he had his share of hard times, but he wouldn’t trade a moment of them. It’s the tough years – growing up in the segregated South, enrolling at PNCA as a black man in his early forties, facing financial uncertainly as an artist — that have informed every brushstroke; every color; every thematic exploration.

“Most of my art, in some way or another, tries to answer the question, ‘Who am I?’” says Smith, looking at a particularly aggressive piece that he painted in 2006 called “The Lower 9th.” The large oil-on-canvas features a pastiche of what he calls “derogatory caricatures” (including Aunt Jemima and “black-face” characters) surrounded by images of forgotten souls swept away in Hurricane Katrina.

“I’d hate to think that my history began with slavery,” says Smith. “To me, that is a lie. But the remnants still exist today, especially in the way we have been depicted in culture. This is what I try to explore in my work.”

Like many before and after him, Smith’s journey from childhood dreamer to working artist didn’t follow any linear path. He left Texas as a teenager and settled in California, where he ultimately worked for many years as counselor for children and adults. On a road-trip in the late 1970’s, he made a chance stop in Portland and felt his early artist inklings awaken.

“I said, ‘Well, this place seems nice. Maybe someday I’ll come back here and finally do the art-school thing,’” he says. “I was struck by the beach, the mountains, the air. The quality of life. I knew I’d be back someday.”

That someday would be a couple years later when Smith, who by then was 41 and married to wife Julie Kern Smith, enrolled in PNCA (then located at the Portland Art Museum). He’d left behind his counseling work (“I wasn’t saving any lives or making money, so, why not?) and discovered that starting over was no easy feat. “The only work-study job they had was mopping floors and cleaning toilets,” says Smith. “It wasn’t great. But, I had to finish school, so I kept my eye on the prize.”

Smith completed his B.F.A. in painting and printmaking in 1985 and spent the following year abroad in Florence, Italy studying printmaking at Il Bisonte. After a short stint teaching back at PNCA, he jumped into graduate work at the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, studying under and assisting Grace Hartigan. He received his M.F.A. there in 1992 and returned to Portland in 1993 to teach at PNCA, where he is still an associate professor of painting.

Since then he has enjoyed continued showings at local galleries such as Beppu Wiarda and Blackfish. His work has also been shown in Florence, New York City, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Los Angeles. In 2005, he was named Artist-in-Residence for the Reginald Lewis Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. The resulting exhibition, “At Freedom’s Door, Challenging Slavery in Maryland,” runs through October 2007.

Smith, who counts Nelson Mandela and NBA star Damon Stoudamire as two high-profile owners of his work, says his extensive travels throughout Africa continue to inspire him. But inspiration, says Smith, is nothing without underlying passion. “You quite simply have to love what you’re doing,” he says. “No one is going to take care of you and it may be years before you make money.”

He pauses and smiles. “But, if you’ve been given the gift, you have to use it to say something important. You don’t have a choice.”

by Stacey Wilson

BFA Majors

Communication Design
General Fine Arts
Illustration
Intermedia
Painting
Photography
Printmaking
Sculpture