{
"data": {
"id": 168133,
"accession_number": "2009.7",
"share_license_status": "Copyrighted",
"tombstone": "Rooftop, 1957. Hughie Lee-Smith (American, 1915\u20131999). Oil on masonite; unframed: 61 x 63.5 cm (24 x 25 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund, 2009.7. \u00a9 Estate of Hughie Lee-Smith / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, NY",
"current_location": "228B Cleveland Artists",
"title": "Rooftop",
"creation_date": "1957",
"creation_date_earliest": 1957,
"creation_date_latest": 1957,
"artists_tags": [
"May Show",
"Black American Artists",
"Cleveland Institute of Art (alumni)"
],
"culture": [
"America"
],
"technique": "oil on masonite",
"support_materials": [],
"department": "American Painting and Sculpture",
"collection": "American - Painting",
"type": "Painting",
"measurements": "Unframed: 61 x 63.5 cm (24 x 25 in.)",
"dimensions": {
"unframed": {
"height": 0.61,
"width": 0.635
}
},
"state_of_the_work": null,
"edition_of_the_work": null,
"copyright": "\u00a9 Estate of Hughie Lee-Smith / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, NY",
"inscriptions": [
{
"inscription": "signed lower right \"Lee-Smith / '57\"",
"inscription_translation": null,
"inscription_remark": null,
"sortorder": null
}
],
"exhibitions": {
"current": [
{
"id": 297065,
"title": "From the Rooftops: John Sloan and the Art of a New Urban Space",
"description": "From the Rooftops: John Sloan and the Art of a New Urban Space. Palmer Museum of Art, University Park, PA (organizer) (February 5-May 12, 2019); The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY (June 16-September 15, 2019).",
"opening_date": "2019-02-05T05:00:00"
}
],
"legacy": []
},
"provenance": [
{
"description": "Flea Market (Florida); Private Collector consigning to Swann Galleries, New York [public auction, February 17, 2009]",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": [],
"date": null,
"sortorder": null
}
],
"find_spot": null,
"related_works": [],
"former_accession_numbers": [],
"did_you_know": "Hughie Lee-Smith ran track with fellow student Jesse Owens at East Technical High School in Cleveland.",
"description": "Trained in Cleveland before launching his mature career in Detroit and New York, Lee-Smith frequently painted isolated\u2014and often solitary\u2014figures amid desolate cityscapes and landscapes. They have pronounced overtones of introspection, which the artist attributed, in part, to his experiences navigating the forces and effects of racism: \"In my case, aloneness, I think, has stemmed from the fact that I\u2019m Black. Unconsciously it has a lot to do with alienation.\"",
"external_resources": {
"wikidata": [
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q60480564"
],
"internet_archive": []
},
"citations": [
{
"citation": "Cole, Mark. \"The Cleveland Gallery.\" Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 49, no. 7 (September 2009): 5-7.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 7; Reproduced: p. 5, Cover",
"url": "https://archive.org/details/CMAMM2009-07/page/4/mode/2up"
},
{
"citation": "King-Hammond, Leslie. Hughie Lee-Smith. San Francisco, CA: Pomegranate, 2010.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: p. 42-46; Reproduced: p. 45, back cover",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Mann, Griffith C. \"Acquisitions 2009.\" Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 50, no. 2 (March/April 2010): 12-27.",
"page_number": "Mentioned and reproduced: p. 18",
"url": "https://archive.org/details/CMAMM2010-02/page/n17/mode/2up"
},
{
"citation": "Shearer, Christine Fowler and Steven Litt. Joseph O'Sickey: Unifying Art, Life and Love. Canton, Ohio: Canton Museum of Art, 2013.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: p. 34",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Cole, Mark, Amy Sparks, and Rebecca Michaels. African American Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013.",
"page_number": "Mentioned and Reproduced: p. 12-13",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Freeman, Nigel. A Modern Migration: African-American Art Since the WPA, from the Lee and Barbara Maimon Collection. Exton, PA: Brilliant Graphics, 2014.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: p. 39",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "Thomas, Adam M. From the Rooftops: John Sloan and the Art of a New Urban Space. University Park, PA; Palmer Museum of Art, 2019.",
"page_number": "Mentioned: P. 61, 72",
"url": null
},
{
"citation": "\"Past Masters.\" In Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Cleveland Arts Prize 2020-2021, edited by Alenka Banco, 19-22. Cleveland: Cleveland Arts Prize, 2020.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: p. 21",
"url": ""
},
{
"citation": "Als, Hilton, Lauren Haynes, Leslie King-Hammond, Steve Locke, Kellie Jones, LeRonn P. Brooks, and Reggie Burrows Hodges. Hughie Lee-Smith. New York: Karma Books, 2023.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: p. 153",
"url": ""
},
{
"citation": "Porter, Austin. \"Hughie Lee-Smith.\" In 150 Stories: Lives of the Artists at the League, edited by Stephanie Cassidy, 366-367. New York, NY: The Art Students League of New York, 2025.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: p. 366",
"url": ""
}
],
"url": "https://clevelandart.org/art/2009.7",
"images": {},
"alternate_images": [],
"creditline": "Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund",
"image_credit": null,
"sketchfab_id": null,
"sketchfab_url": null,
"gallery_donor_text": "William P. and Amanda C. Madar Gallery",
"athena_id": 168133,
"creators": [
{
"id": 557245,
"description": "Hughie Lee-Smith (American, 1915\u20131999)",
"extent": null,
"qualifier": null,
"role": "artist",
"biography": "One of the most gifted figurative painters of his generation, Hughie Lee-Smith was born in Eustis, Florida. He moved to Cleveland in 1925 with his mother, a singer who recognized her son's talent and enrolled him in Saturday-morning classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. While in high school, he took life-drawing classes at the Huntington Polytechnic Institute. After attending classes at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, 1933-34, he studied with Carl Gaertner and Rolf Stoll at the Cleveland School of Art, graduating in 1938. During this period Lee-Smith taught drawing at Karamu House, then known as the Playhouse Settlement. For financial reasons he declined a fifth-year scholarship from the Cleveland School of Art in 1938 and began working for the Works Progress Administration's Ohio Art Project, where he learned lithography and etching. He exhibited in the annual May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1937-41). In 1939 he became a board member of the magazine \"Crossroads\" and later that year received a one-year appointment to teach art at Claflin College in South Carolina. In 1940 he cofounded Karamu Artists Incorporated and served as the organization's president. In the early 1940s he moved to Detroit, the hometown of his new wife. After serving in the navy during World War II, he returned to Detroit and attended Wayne University, where he earned a B. S. in education in 1953. He exhibited steadily throughout the 1940s and 1950s, showing at galleries in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. In 1957 he won the prestigious Emily Lowe Award from the National Academy of Design and soon after moved to New York. In 1967 he was elected a full-member of the National Academy of Design and began teaching there in 1972. In 1988 the Malcolm Brown Gallery in Cleveland mounted a solo exhibition of his work, and later that year the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton organized a retrospective. Lee-Smith lives and works in New Jersey.
\"Transformations in Cleveland Art (CMA, 1996), p. 233",
"name_in_original_language": null,
"birth_year": "1915",
"death_year": "1999",
"use_in_caption": true,
"include_extent": false,
"weight": 1
}
],
"legal_status": "accessioned",
"accession_date": "2009-03-02T00:00:00",
"sortable_date": 1957,
"date_added_to_oa": null,
"date_text": "1957",
"collapse_artists": false,
"on_loan": false,
"recently_acquired": false,
"record_type": "object",
"conservation_statement": null,
"has_conservation_images": false,
"cover_accession_number": null,
"is_nazi_era_provenance": false,
"impression": null,
"alternate_titles": [],
"is_highlight": false,
"updated_at": "2026-03-27 00:02:16.970000"
}
}