Dr. Charles Smith, The African-American Heritage Museum + Black Veterans' Archive

The Site

Dr. Charles Smith is a placemaker, having fully transformed the homes and yards of two properties over forty years. In 1986 he purchased a property in Aurora, Illinois, with plans to renovate the house. After completing a concrete commemorative sculpture for a fallen friend in Vietnam, he continued crafting figurative sculptures in concrete. By the time he left the property in 2000, The African-American Heritage Museum + Black Veterans’ Archive contained over six hundred sculptures. A consummate teacher, Dr. Smith views all of African-American history as viable subject matter. He excavates history to elevate little-known stories of Black public figures like Howard McGee (the first Black postmaster general) and to celebrate those figures who made the history books like George Washington Carver and Malcom X. He simultaneously honors the everyday people in his life who are fighting for change or making a sacrifice for their community, such as his neighbor Nadine and his good friend Sargent Ramey, who was killed in Vietnam.

Just as the sculptures are never “finished” for Dr. Smith, their identities within his environment are never final. As they continually deteriorate and are reinvigorated, each new physical form they take can warrant a new identity. As Dr. Smith continues his historical research and his meditations on news cycles and current events, he uses his sculptures to forefront the issues he feels are most pressing. Rosa Parks can become his grandmother who can become a victim of a shooting— equally powerful narratives he feels compelled to address. As an artist, activist, scholar, and educator, Dr. Smith’s work is never done.

After a fateful stop in Hammond, Louisiana, in 2000, convinced Dr. Smith that he needed to relocate his project there, the majority of the sculptures from his Aurora site were removed, conserved, and acquired by several museums. The 218 sculptures acquired by the Arts Center make it the largest single institutional holding of the artist’s work.

Today, he continues his work on a new site in Hammond.

Dr. Charles Smith

b. 1940

Dr. Charles Smith was born in New Orleans in 1940. Two childhood incidents of race-based violence instilled in him a lifetime of searing feelings about racism and inequality. When he was fourteen, his father was killed in what local officials described as a ferry accident, but which Dr. Smith believes was a racially motivated murder. Soon after, he and his family moved to Chicago. The following year, his mother took him to the funeral of Emmett Till, an African American boy from Chicago who was violently murdered by racists in Mississippi.

In 1966 Dr. Smith was drafted into the Vietnam War and served two years as an infantryman in the Marines. His combat experiences left deep physical, psychological, and spiritual wounds and compounded his sense of the injustices that plagued the world. In 1985 he acquired a home in Aurora Township, Illinois. Over the next fourteen years, Smith dedicated himself to transforming his home and yard into a sculptural environment commemorating the people and events of African American history, from slavery to the present. He named it the African-American Heritage Museum + Black Veterans’ Archive. A fastidious researcher, historian, and activist, Smith appended “Dr.” to his name to connote the learned status he has achieved from life experience.

In 2001 Dr. Smith relocated his project to Hammond, Louisiana, and he continues his work there today. Approximately five hundred painted concrete sculptures from the Aurora environment have been preserved and placed with nineteen institutions, including over two hundred pieces with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.