Exhibited: Jazz &...., Kreft Center Gallery, Concordia University, Ann Arbor, MI, January 23 - March 9, 2003 ,with the label on the verso.
Do-Rag Brother is a wonderfully expressive painting by Vincent Smith, and only the second significant painting by the artist to come to auction. Here with his intense, fiery colors and a gritty texture of sand, Smith depicts an almost abstract, graffiti-covered and scarred wall. Vincent Smith wanted to record an era when many took to the streets, and he painted many episodes of the Civil Rights struggle in the 1960s with fiery scenes from New York City to the Watts Riots in Los Angeles. As in his other 1968 paintings, including The Fire Next Time in the collection of the Detroit Art Institute and Waiting, Smith paints politically and socially disenfranchised figures in sihouette or flattened against the picture plane. They are powerful and unforgiving - the figures often confront the viewer, and are pressed against their urban environment, the stark store fronts and dark street corners of the Village and Brooklyn. Smith himself has stressed this relationship - "When I paint, I'm always aware of composition because I've always felt that the tighter the composition, the more interesting the work," he told American Visions magazine in 1999.
