Art is not new to us but it’s new to us appreciating it because of social media and Instagram and that sort of stuff,” Smith said of social media exposing Black art to more Black audiences.Īccording to Pew Research study conducted in April 2021, 77 percent of Black Americans use at least one social media per day, compared to 80 percent of Hispanic or Latino and 69 percent of white Americans.

“Ten years ago, I feel like most Black Americans could not name more than five Black artists. Smith also painting promotional art for season 3 of “Atlanta.” His art has grabbed the attention of names like Swizz Beatz, Chance the Rapper, actress Tonya Pinkins and Russell Simmons. Leading up to President Obama’s inauguration, Smith and his friend Michael Silva drew a picture of the 44 th president and printed 10,000 copies to sell in barbershops, restaurants, and churches. “We couldn’t draw any cartoons, and the first five years we couldn’t use any color, and everything was super realism and everything black and white, pencils and charcoal,” he said. Smith has been involved with the arts since he was 12 years old, when he developed a love for drawing cartoons, but while in art school in Delaware he had to adjust to a more Eurocentric style of art, at least for a brief period of time. It’s like a double language, it’s like a hidden language,” he said. I feel like it’s an ancient thing that we understand you don’t have to talk to talk. You can use all of these pictures to describe a whole story without saying one word. “I look at it as modern-day hieroglyphs and emojis. The Wilmington, Delaware, artist took popular Black memes from the digital space to the canvas. “Somebody outside the culture could see these same pictures and just see pictures, but we can tell a whole story with that stuff, and it’s deep,” Smith said. Black internet memes have developed a life of their own, and as Afro-surrealist artist Alim Smith, 31, says, popular Black memes embody unspoken language the Black community can easily understand.

Black baby meme