The Color Line
Daniel Soutif, curator of the exhibition The color Line, has gathered nearly two hundred works, among which a painting on a tartan by Mary T. Smith.
This exhibition traces the history of black segregation in the United States from the Civil War to the present day. 150 years of African-American art history, through the works of emblematic artists of that time, themselves victims of racial discrimination and marginalized.
A poor child of Mississippi condemned to the hardest work, this African-American woman began, at the dawn of her life, a work that resembles a real graphic blues. Mary T. Smith gave shape to her personal cosmology by painting on sheets of corrugated iron and wooden panels
arranged around her house. Her “solar aesthetic”—says Daniel Soutif—and her powerfully elementary modes of representation made a strong impression on Jean‑Michel Basquiat. Now considered an emblematic figure of American art brut, her works have been added to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (Washington) and the High Museum of Art (Atlanta) collections.