Love Lifts Us Up, 2010
MALCOLM MOBUTU SMITH
Love Lifts Us Up, 2010
Stoneware, slip and glaze
17 x 14 x 15 in
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.
