Aurora, IL

1986-2001

In 1986, after years of post-traumatic stress and other hardships he bore after service in Vietnam, economic circumstances lead Charles Smith to 126 South Kendall Street in Aurora Township, Illinois, a fairly derelict property, where he directed his energies into his first soulful and powerful project as a placemaker. Over a period of fifteen years he transformed his home and yard into a monumental sculptural environment commemorating the people and events of African-American history, from the inception of slavery to the present. He began using the self-imposed title “Dr.” to connote the status he achieved from studies and life experiences, as an indication of accumulated wisdom. His work began with sculptures and tableaux visualizing his immediate experience – the inequities of the country towards African American Veterans – and expanded to encompass the entire African American experience, a project without end. He called his home environment the African American Heritage Museum and Black Veterans Archive.

Dr. Smith created large fixed monuments of rock, broken concrete, and wood along the North Avenue border of the site, to represent Africa, the Middle Passage, and slave ships, and incorporated a succession of life-size figural sculptures representing moments in the Civil Rights movement into this and other narrative, bunker-type structures protecting the perimeter of the yard. He completely transformed his house with layers of sculptures and signage, and filled the yard with figural sculptures. He built armatures of found materials and covered them with wood fiber, plaster, cement, fabric, and all manner of found materials, and finished them off with a sturdy patina of enamel paint. Once painted the works were left outside to be exposed to the elements in a process he called “weatherization,” thus beginning their “lives” as figural sculptures in the world, exposed to the elements. The figures represented many real people, as well as an ever-growing number of unidentified ordinary people he encountered in everyday life. One of the most excruciating events while in Vietnam was the death of a friend and brother-in-combat. Dr. Smith created a figural memorial to Sergeant Jordan E. Ramey, standing at attention, in the center of the roof ridgeline. This sculpture became a symbolic lightning rod for the AAHM&BVA.

Hammond, LA

2005-Present

In 2000, on his way from Illinois to New Orleans, Dr. Charles Smith stopped in Hammond, Louisiana for a meal. He asked people where he could learn about Hammond history and was directed to a historical marker under a mammoth live oak, reading,

Peter Hammond (1798 – 1870) Under this oak is buried Peter Hammond, of Sweden, who founded Hammond, La., about 1818. Nearby are the graves of his wife, three daughters and a favorite slave boy.

On the ground below he saw the simple granite monument inscribed UNNAMED SLAVE BOY.

Incensed by the heartlessness and anonymity of “favorite slave boy” as a legitimate presentation of history, Dr. Smith vowed on the spot to rectify the injustice; his commitment was immediate and determined. He purchased a house and yard at the corner of East Louisiana and Walnut Streets, in Hammond, and began his second African American Heritage Museum and Black Veterans Archive (AAHM&BBVA).

Dr. Smith’s environment in Hammond is remarkably similar, in form and composition, to his former Aurora, Illinois site. He began by fortifying the modest, one story frame house, strengthening the porch and part of the south wall with mortar and rock. All elements of Dr. Smith’s work are emblematic of historical moments and contain symbolic meanings. His inclination is to modify conventional houses into bunkers, safe havens within a violence-prone society, by this veteran of the Vietnam War.

Sheboygan, WI

2016-Present

Dr. Smith's home in Aurora was demolished in April 2021. Many of Dr. Charles Smith's sculptures from the Aurora site are on permanent view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center's Art Preserve in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.