Zell Ingram, Hughie Lee-Smith,

and Karamu House

In 1915, amidst the Roaring Third District of Cleveland, Ohio, an impoverished area of the city rife with bars, gambling dens, and other dens of iniquity, Russell and Rowena Jelliffe founded Karamu House (a place of joyful gathering - in Swahili) - then known as Playhouse Settlement.  Their purpose was to create an interracial center of arts where all in the neighborhood could gather to learn and create in the areas of theater, dance, music, and the visual arts.  In this setting, an Afro-centric approach was adopted and maintained.

A statement from the Karamu House outlined their aims,

Karamu House uses its arts programs to accomplish two ends. First, the direction of the Negro’s creative abilities into the main stream of American life, thus removing him from the isolation which has been so costly to initiative and ambition.  Secondly, to enable the Negro to tell his own story to the community and the nation, making directly known his sufferings, his dissatisfactions, his aspirations, and his ambitions. (1)

The studios of Karamu House launched the artistic endeavors of many who came through its doors, including Charles Sallee, Jr., Elmer Brown, William E. Smith, Curtis Tann, Zell Ingram, and Hughie Lee-Smith, who would become well respected visual artists in their own right.

When Zell (Rozelle) Ingram (1910-1971) arrived at Karamu House, he was mainly interested in sculpture, but became skilled as a painter and printmaker as well.  Langston Hughes was one of his teachers, and later on counted as a close friend, who owned most of Ingram’s work. Ingram was an excellent puppet maker and eventually converted an old Model T Ford into a traveling puppet theater, which he took on the road to the South and East coast.

As a member of Karamu House, Ingram created social realist linocuts documenting Cleveland’s Prohibition and Depression-era ghettos.  He mentored other artists, including Curtis Tann and Fred Carlo.

In 1922, famous Black actor, Charles Gilpin (1878-1930) established a fund for the Karamu artists to distribute to those members of merit.  Hughie Lee-Smith (1915-1999) was the second recipient of the Gilpin scholarship for study at the Cleveland School of Art. When he completed his study there, he produced lithographs and etchings for the WPA. It was noted in Yet We Still Rise, African American Art in Cleveland (1920-1970) that Hughie Lee-Smith had “never set foot in the Roaring Third.”  He came from a middle class background.  However, a stipulation of his Gilpin award said that he must go to Karamu “once or twice a week to teach unfortunate children” and that “their plight was to affect him deeply.”(2). His paintings and prints of this time show the beginnings of his signature style and recurrent motifs of psychological alienation - “dead trees; figures frozen in movement and usually turning their backs to the viewer; kites and balloons, ribbons and strings. (3)

Charles Sallee, Jr., Elmer Brown, Curtis Tann, William E. Smith, Zell Ingram, and Lee-Smith formed a group within the Karamu House called the Karamu Artists, Inc. for serious critique and collaboration. The group went national in 1942 with an exhibition organized by Dorothy Morgan and Eleanor Roosevelt in New York City, which eventually went on to Philadelphia.

Zell Ingram left Cleveland in the early 1940s to study at the Art Students League in New York City, where he pursued study with such highly acclaimed artists as William Zurich, Will Barnett, Vaclav Dytlacil, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.  He taught at the Harlem YMCA, created illustrative work for The Crisis, and his work in sculpture, printmaking, and painting was shown in many historically important exhibitions.  The painting we are presenting in this auction, Seated Nude, 1965 (lot 128) was presented in Black Artists: Two Generations, held at the Newark Museum, May 13-Sept. 6, 1971.  The previous year, it was a part of Afro-American Artists, New York and Boston which was presented by the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.