Malcolm Mobutu Smith by Wexler Gallery

MALCOLM MOBUTU SMITH

By Dallas Dunn

Malcolm Mobutu Smith’s ceramic sculptures inhabit a dynamic space between play and critique, tradition and rebellion, beauty and confrontation. His work is guided by improvisation—both in form and thought—and is rooted in a rich intersection of graffiti art, comic books, hip hop, jazz, and African sculptural aesthetics. Blending wheel-thrown and hand-built techniques, Smith’s vessels are often abstractions of cups, bottles, and vases, yet they transcend functionality. These are not simply objects, but embodiments of identity, cultural critique, and aesthetic inquiry.

At the core of Smith’s practice is a visual language that fuses volumetric complexity with graphic flatness. The sculptures appear simultaneously soft and muscular—globular forms that call to mind both bodily organs and dynamic comic book action. They are playful in their movement yet heavy with meaning. Formally, they reference the

resilience and universality of the clay pot—a signifier of human survival and creativity across millennia— while abstractly serving as metaphors for the human body and condition. The vessel becomes a standin for the body politic, asking: What do we conceal beneath the surface?

Many of Smith’s works confront this question directly. Behind the lyrical curves and vibrant surfaces, he hides racially charged imagery—appropriated from American periodicals of the 1930s to 1950s—which appears only upon closer inspection. These images, sometimes grotesque caricatures of Black identity, are recontextualized to critique enduring racism and the persistence of cultural trauma. In pieces like No More Words, proud figures like Lil’ Tuffy are juxtaposed with offensive historical representations, creating a complex dialogue between shame and pride, despair and resistance.

As a young graffiti artist working from Flint to Philadelphia, Smith occupied physical space with his tags—claiming visibility and voice. In clay, he now occupies the conceptual space of ceramics, treating the pot not just as a craft object, but as a canvas for cultural discourse.

As Khephra Burns wrote in American Ceramics (Volume 15, Number 3), “Graffiti is an invasion of turf, an appropriation of space, an annexation of territory. Smith has occupied by force of creative reinterpretation, what he sees as the common ground of human culture: the clay pot. Throughout time it has been used as a carrier, not only of vital sustenance, but also marks of the moment. Marks that, like the tags created by graffiti artists, signal “human here. ”

Since 2010, Smith’s practice has been shaped by the turbulence of American politics and society. Sparked by what he describes as the “anxieties, fears, and uncertainties” surrounding the country’s socio-political landscape—including the rise and backlash to America’s first Black president—his work channels both personal and collective unease. Early pieces from this period exude a cautious optimism, while later works reflect disillusionment, underscoring that the issues of race, inequality, and cultural division are not historical artifacts but ongoing ruptures.

While some of his works deliver direct social critique, others explore form for its own sake. Smith’s nonobjective ceramic works explore archetypal forms abstracted through a lens of earthly whimsy. At first glance, many of these sculptures resemble traditional pottery—vases, jars, or other utilitarian vessels. This resemblance is intentional, playing with the viewer’s expectations of function. Yet closer inspection reveals exaggerated forms, blocked openings, unstable bases, or ornamental features

that make practical use impossible. These pieces are not designed to serve; rather, they are meant to provoke visual and contemplative interest.

Smith describes this body of work as “a collection of overtly decorative embellishments to utilitarian vase forms that use the wet plasticity of the clay wall for fanciful ornaments, flourishes of line, shifting material textures, reflectivity, and distorted volumes. Each of these forms builds unified expression through the unexpected—seeking either joyous play, sensuous curves, or interest through discord.”

Across his body of work, Malcolm Mobutu Smith constructs a ceramic language that is as critical as it is celebratory. He reclaims the vessel as a site of identity, memory, and resistance. With each form, he invites viewers not just to look—but to reckon. Seductive in form, confrontational in content, his sculptures ask us to consider the beauty of contradiction and the necessity of reflection.

Li’l Tuffy is a recurrent motif in Smith’s work

A black child in a red, green, and black jumpsuit. The character was created by Smith’s mother Jean Pajot Smith, and featured in two children’s books 1st published by Johnson publishing/Ebony Jr! in the 1970s. The character was created in the image of her multiracial children. In No More Words a defiant Li’l Tuffy raises a fist in a triumphant pose of “Black Power.”

No More Words, 2021

Stoneware | 23 x 16 x 13 inches

Gleeful Anxiety, 2021

Stoneware |14.5 x 17.5 x 10 inches

In “Love Lifts Us Up” (2010), the hope of reconciliation and peace is even more elusive, as if the child in short pants (based on the 1940 comic book figure “Little Eight Ball”) can save himself by blowing a big enough pink gum bubble, which appears sure to topple down onto him from the top of Smith’s tilting pot. Developing from teen-age street artist to university professor, Mobutu Smith avoids ideological expressions or explicit statements in the same way graffiti tags are ambiguous yet jaggedly applied.

Love Lifts Us Up, 2010

Stoneware | 17 x 14 x 15 inches

Stoneware | 19 x 13 x 9 inches

Uppity Uproar, 2021

Stoneware | 17 x 17 x 17 inches

Butterscotch, 2023

Whitewash is pretty much straight absurdist –deployment of an actual character created for comic relief in comic books from the 1940s whose name is Whitewash, wherein in the name then was tongue-in-cheek humor of the ironic sort and by me redeploying it in the context of a ‘high’ art object where its shapes and forms are laid out for aesthetic import as much as cultural critique.

The audacity of the character itself in my opinion is re-doubled by my audacity in representing it. As if to shout to everyone ‘For real… are you all serious with this shit? You all thought this was OK to lampoon us this way and feed it to your kids?’”

- Malcolm Mobutu Smith

Whitewash, 2010

Stoneware | 18.5 x 19.5 x 10 inches

Stoneware | 13 x 20 x 15 inches

Hoof ‘N Mouth, 2010

This piece features a character called Li’l Tuffy created by my mother for a cartoon coloring book published in 1971 by Johnson Publishing (of Ebony, Jet and Essence magazine fame). This work has an original image of Li’l Tuffy, created and drawn by me, ‘floating’ on the surface of the vessel in the midst of angry glaze colors and action.

-Malcolm Mobutu Smith