On a recent August morning, the artist Harold Smith was starting on his first painting of the day in his home studio, just off State Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas. He picked up a brush full of metallic pearl-tinted paint and started mixing it on his palette.
“Gotta be careful in the morning,” Smith said. “More than once I’ve accidentally taken a sip of my paint water instead of my coffee, not paying attention.”
Smith works quickly and within the hour, two men began to take shape on his canvas set against an electric blue background. One wears a blue tie and grips a coffee mug in his hand.
“You ever seen ‘Apocalypse Now?’” Smith asked. “You know that line, ‘There’s nothing like the smell of napalm in the morning?’ I say there’s nothing like the smell of acrylic in the morning.”
The self-taught artist has a new series of paintings now showing at the Mulvane Art Museum on the campus of Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. Entitled “Around the Way Folk, Saints in Uncommon Places,” the exhibit lets Smith put a personal spin on well-known works from art history.
“Basically, it's an exploration of people I consider saints and things like that,” he said. “It's also a look at Black, blue collar communities. I still live in the same one I grew up in, and it’s an examination of the culture that still exists there.”
Smith takes familiar works of art like Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and Leonardo DaVinci’s “The Last Supper,” and recasts them with people from his Kansas City, Kansas, neighborhood.
“All these paintings have stories and narratives that we can relate to, and not just we, but the community I grew up in and people that are around me, can relate to,” Smith said. “So that's how I kind of started on this path.”
Smith uses high-voltage hues and expressive brushstrokes to convey his ideas.
“I chose, just like all painters choose, to reflect the times in their own particular style,” he said. “I used a palette knife primarily for them, color schemes that people normally may not think of and I often call it Blacktacularization.”
In a nod to his feelings about the state of Black America, Smith said his “Blacktacular” style is his attempt to make the most out of what he calls a bad situation — to make lemonade out of lemons.
“The rapper Tupac, in his song “Dear Mama,” said ‘Mama took the little she was given and created miracles every Thanksgiving.’” Smith said.
“And to me, Blacktacularization is when you apply Black culture to different things,” he said. “Like you apply it to food, you get soul food, you apply it to popular music, you had the blues.”
At the Mulvane Art Museum, Smith’s three large panels of “The Last Supper: Blacktacularized” take up an entire wall. Many of the apostle’s faces are based on his friends and neighbors. The museum’s Interim Director Sara Stepp said she was drawn to Smith’s bold reframing of familiar works.
“Harold has always been interested in Black representation and Black experience and he is asking a really, I think, interesting question,” Stepp said. “‘What would these works look like if instead of the traditional white protagonists, they instead had Black subjects?’”
Stepp said Smith’s paintings shine a spotlight on people who’ve often been excluded from art.
“His works are about Black American identity, usually Black American male identity, and he wants you to witness that experience in full color,” Stepp said. “He wants you to see the good and the bad, the painful and the hopeful in those stories that he shares.”
Stepp said Smith offers a pointed perspective in his paintings.
Smith's work has received both local and national acclaim. He received a Charlotte Street Visual Arts Award and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022. He was selected for the Art Omi International Artists Residency Program in 2023. Locally, he’s exhibited at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the Lawrence Arts Center.
“He just very forcefully inserts Black figures into those works,” Stepp said. “He also really transforms the style. So it's mostly the original composition that remains, and I found that to be really moving and poignant and important for this moment.”
Harold Smith will speak at a gallery talk on Tuesday, September 16, at 5:30 p.m. "Around the Way Folk: Saints in Uncommon Places" runs through November 1, 2025, at The Mulvane Art Museum, 1700 SW Jewell Ave, Topeka, KS 66621. For more information, go to: mulvaneartmuseum.org.
