Before Black Lives Matter was a movement, Black lives mattered in the work of Dr. Charles Smith. A Vietnam vet and prodigious self-taught artist, he’s spent decades recreating the Black American experience in figurative sculpture, from the time of the slave ships to Harriet Tubman, MLK, and beyond.
“God said, ‘Use art. I give you a weapon,’” Smith told me then.
Granddaughter of the Kohler Company founder that the Art Center’s named for, and daughter of the former Chicago Tribune “women’s” editor that she was named for, Kohler II was the Art Center’s director from 1972 to 2016. She was responsible for the Center’s strong reputation as an institution focused on folk and self-taught artists and, with her brother, Kohler Co. board chair Herbert V. Kohler Jr., launched a residency program that has had hundreds of artists collaborating with the company’s plumbing fixture artisans since 1974. The Art Center’s bathrooms are perennial winners in world’s best public toilet listings, and a highlight of that museum.
