Imagination has a particular truth for African American artist Nikkolas Smith. It shows in the way he draws his great-great-grandparents on Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the US — in Sunday best, she in a gown and he in suit and hat — where Smith is clearly having a laugh over the incongruity of it all.
“It seemed weird to me that just the day before the holiday they were considered less than human…,” he says.
What were their names? The 39-year-old artist, who was in Delhi as part of the American Center’s commemoration of Black History Month, says he does not know. Most African Americans cannot go far back — that is, give names or identities of their ancestors because they lost them when they were forced to take on their slave owners. So, if a past has been erased, it simply has to be imagined. “I create what I want to see,” says Smith.
Smith began his career at Walt Disney Imagineering; there he designed for Disney theme parks, going on to create best-selling picture books focused on history and social justice, and collaborating with important organisations to shed light on crucial topics. But he will be known in our part of the world for his association with the Oscar-winning movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. He was the concept and poster artist of the 2022 American superhero film based on the character Shuri / Black Panther from Marvel Comics.
“The Cloned Tyrone [a 2023 American science fiction comedy mystery film, director Juel Taylor’s feature debut] is the name of my next film and I need you to be the first concept artist on it… all we have is a script’ is a typical way I get a pitch,” says Smith with a laugh. “A concept artist creates what a scene will be like before a set has been built and the actors and the crew move in,” he says.
The real superheroes
Why are Americans hooked on superheroes? Recent criticism from legends such as Martin Scorsese compare them to “theme park rides”, not unlike the ones Smith has populated, promising people a fantasy, a hero’s downfall, and delivering them safely at a bus stop, as it were, by the time the film ends.
“They give a lot of people hope, and can be empowering,” he says. “For instance, the Wakanda film held out the notion of an African nation that has never been discovered and conquered. So, for Blacks in the USA, it’s inspirational. Across the board, superheroes help us escape everyday life. Should superheroes be political? Well, Wakanda did that very well.”
Smith has also drawn the Obama family as The Incredibles as part of a private sketch series at the time of Barack’s re-election. It was popular on social media; the Obamas sent a ‘thank you letter’; PIXAR, the makers of The Incredibles asked him to make T-shirts, the most non-fuss way for American brands to stick a logo and sell or re-sell an idea in a market.
No escaping
That said, Smith certainly has not made his career out of escapism or being just market-friendly. “I focus on the real superheroes,” he says, through whose stories or words or just their example, he tries to shed new meaning on contemporary life — or even place them bang in the middle of the make-believe world he knows, Disneyland.
A few months ago, he did the design for a Legacy Tower in Downtown Disney District, paying homage but also placing in front of all Americans other potential heroes, the trailblazing black architects of the mid-20th century such as Paul Revere Williams, an architect to Hollywood stars; being Black he was considered “unhirable” for many projects.
In 2015, when young Trayvon Martin, wearing a hoodie, was shot by George Zimmerman, a watchman for a gated community in Florida, as he thought Martin looked “suspicious”, Smith put up a painting of Martin Luther King with a hoodie, captioning it, “Does he look scary to you?”.
Similarly, when Jahnvi Kandula, an Indian student was struck and killed by a police car while crossing a Seattle street in 2023, Smith drew her, calling out the “many [who] decided to laugh and mock her life and death immediately after she was hit by their patrol car… Jaahnavi’s life was worth infinitely more than an “$11,000 check”.
Being an artivist
Smith takes a lot of his work, which he describes as “artivism”, to kids and the youth; that is why he does a lot of picture books. It is at a level everyone can understand. What he aims to do is “fix the broken bones of the world”, try to speak of issues in an artistic way so that people are moved to sign a petition or get government servants to act on their behalf.
“There are a lot of victims of systematic racism in the US, so who I’m calling out is the system because it’s bigger than one person. It’s often said America is founded on justice, we have to make sure it really is so.”
Some of Smith’s books are “banned” in some US states — stories that have questioned the problematic areas of America’s history, such as his book on Ruby Nell Bridges Hall (the first African American child to attend a formerly Whites-only school in 1960) or the one on the Confederate flag (the flag used by those in favour of slavery during the American Civil War) that is still in use.
“When Martin Luther King came to India in 1959, he was introduced as an ‘untouchable’. America too has its caste system. There are people who want to mute certain ideas, if some people feel they don’t want to read about things that are wrong in American history, I feel more the reason for me to keep making them,” he says.
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