Macon Magazine

February/March 2025| maconmagazine.com 61 want people to have an 'aha!' moment when they look at my paintings." Smith, 54, was born in Philadelphia; his mother was from Thomaston, Georgia. When he was six, his family moved to Southwest Atlanta. Early on, he showed creative flair, doodling and designing the backdrops for school plays. "But, you know, people told me to get a real job when I graduated." That real job was barbering, but he continued to create, hanging his work on the shop's walls. By chance, he ended up cutting the hair of William Tolliver, a self-taught African American artist whose portraits of cotton field workers, country landscapes, and jazz musicians were a sensation in the 1980s. Tolliver invited the wide-eyed young artist back to his grand, two-story studio. "It was in Buckhead with marble floors and huge oil paintings," Smith recalls. "I was blown away, just fascinated. It showed me that you could make a living from art. So I put in my notice at the barbershop and haven't looked back. I had a little money saved up from the barbershop, and I used that to buy art supplies." Smith, who has worked in acrylics, oils, collages, and photography, has never had any formal training. "I might watch the occasional YouTube video about how to mix or speed up the drying process, but that's all." He started by painting Black-themed, ragged- edged postage stamps. "I didn't know the route to take to get them shown," he says. On a lark, he took some to the Barbara Archer Gallery in 1999. He sold six paintings and garnered a solo exhibition. Smith moved to Savannah, where he lived for 15 years. During that time, he made a connection with Curtiss Jacob, a native of the Georgia coast who runs a prestigious gallery in New York City. "Cedric is just such a humble, down-to-earth human being, and you seldom find that in the art world," Jacob says. "I soon found myself eating vegetarian food with him and hanging out at his studio, which was packed with all kinds of interesting, eclectic stuff, and listening to records." Jacob arranged Smith's first solo show in New York, called Facing History, where comedian Chris "I try to tell a story with my paintings and fill a void. I'm addressing the American history that's not taught in scho ol textb o oks." and not see a single Black face on the wall. I try to tell a story with my paintings and fill a void. I'm addressing the American history that's not taught in school textbooks." Among his subjects are caddies, cowboys, inventors, and the nimble Black jockeys who distinguished the Kentucky Derby. Because so much of his work is inspired by advertisements, cooks and their food have also figured prominently – canned goods, cereal, popsicles, juicy plums, lots of red and white Coca-Cola signage. His vibrant, playful colors are known to trigger the senses. "He really pushes the nostalgia buttons to make your mouth water – you can smell the bacon grease of your grandmother cooking when you look at some of his paintings," said Kimberly Fisher, an Atlanta- based collector of contemporary Southeastern art. She owns seven of Smith's pieces, which are displayed among the work of Radcliffe Bailey, Deborah Roberts, and Kevin Cole. "Cedric blends the old with the new and has created a very recognizable storytelling 'voice' – a singular, original style with his painting. You glance at one of his paintings and know immediately that he's the artist behind it." Smith's work also has graced the Curtiss Jacobs Gallery in New York, the Fay Gold Gallery in Atlanta, and Charlotte's Mint Museum, and it belongs in the permanent collections of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Coca-Cola, the New-York Historical Society, and other institutions. Of course, Macon's Tubman Museum has one of his paintings of a boy on a horse. Smith is driven by a deep existential curiosity about identity. He idly thumbs through a book or magazine or watches television and wonders: Where are the Black characters? Then he finds them. "I'm a sponge, and my paintings are my diary. If I learn something new about my culture, I want to share it. I

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