One of the most gifted figurative painters of his generation, Hughie Lee-Smith was born in Eustis, Florida. He moved to Cleveland in 1925 with his mother, a singer who recognized her son's talent and enrolled him in Saturday-morning classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. While in high school, he took life-drawing classes at the Huntington Polytechnic Institute. After attending classes at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, 1933-34, he studied with Carl Gaertner and Rolf Stoll at the Cleveland School of Art, graduating in 1938. During this period Lee-Smith taught drawing at Karamu House, then known as the Playhouse Settlement. For financial reasons he declined a fifth-year scholarship from the Cleveland School of Art in 1938 and began working for the Works Progress Administration's Ohio Art Project, where he learned lithography and etching. He exhibited in the annual May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1937-41). In 1939 he became a board member of the magazine "Crossroads" and later that year received a one-year appointment to teach art at Claflin College in South Carolina. In 1940 he cofounded Karamu Artists Incorporated and served as the organization's president. In the early 1940s he moved to Detroit, the hometown of his new wife. After serving in the navy during World War II, he returned to Detroit and attended Wayne University, where he earned a B. S. in education in 1953. He exhibited steadily throughout the 1940s and 1950s, showing at galleries in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. In 1957 he won the prestigious Emily Lowe Award from the National Academy of Design and soon after moved to New York. In 1967 he was elected a full-member of the National Academy of Design and began teaching there in 1972. In 1988 the Malcolm Brown Gallery in Cleveland mounted a solo exhibition of his work, and later that year the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton organized a retrospective. Lee-Smith lives and works in New Jersey.
"Transformations in Cleveland Art (CMA, 1996), p. 233