By Deanna Isaacs
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In the mid-1980s, Dr. Charles Smith heard the voice of God, and God had one word for him: art. Smith, a Vietnam vet, had lost his job as a rehab counselor and was feeling the cumulative pain and anger of a lifetime. “God said, ‘Use art. I give you a weapon,’” he recalls. “Just like he gave Dr. King the Gandhi strategy. And when he gave me that weapon, I weared it out. Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, nonsleepin’, noneatin’.”
Smith was once a minister, and when he talks about his museum he preaches–a sustained, spitfire sermon about the lack of appreciation for black history, the need to preserve and pass on the real record of black experience and contributions, and the trouble he’s having trying to do that. He wants to improve his place. If he had the money, he’d clean up the grounds, hire a staff, build a shelter for the sculptures, now subjected to the weather year-round. So far, his requests for grants have been unsuccessful: “When I’m dead, then everybody’ll come by, sponsored by the city of Aurora. ‘How great this is, what one man did.’ Why not now?”
