Smokehouse Associates: Harlem and Abstraction c. 1969

This paper considers the relationship between issues of abstraction and black urban places in the United States in the late 1960s by focusing on the work of Smokehouse Associates. Consisting of the artists William T. Williams, Melvin Edwards, Billy Rose, and Guy Ciarcia, Smokehouse made abstract murals and sculptures in the streets of Harlem, often with the help of community members. Their work exists at the intersection of two artistic traditions that scholarship often treats as antithetical: modernist abstraction and the Black Arts Movement. This paper argues that Harlem's changing significance in the 1960s—its purported transformation from Mecca to ghetto—is central to understanding how the artists synthesized ideas associated with these two traditions in their work. It argues that the neighborhood allowed the artists to artistically engage with pressing racial issues without forsaking their commitment to abstraction. By incorporating the physical spaces of Harlem into their work, Smokehouse posed a confrontation between the racialized narratives embedded in the built environment, the lived spaces of everyday Harlemites, and abstract works of art. The result was an abstract practice that, through its direct relationship to place, defied appeals to the idiom’s universality and instead constituted a highly specific and localized version of political engagement that challenged Harlem’s negative connotations in the period.