Actress, playwright and professor Anna Deavere Smith will be the 73rd presenter for the A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts at the National Gallery of Art.
Anna Deavere Smith rehearses her signature form of documentary theater in Baltimore in 2015. Anna Deavere Smith has spent over four decades as a stalwart of documentary theater, interviewing people across the country and replicating their exact speech and mannerisms onstage in a series of works she’s called “On the Road: A Search for American Character.
In an interview, Smith shared insights on the lectures and how they will reflect her life and work. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.The first one is going to be a general overview of what my work is and how I do it. A lot of people, if they know who I am, think about me as being on “The West Wing,” where I was the national security adviser. Maybe they think about me as being on “Nurse Jackie” or even “Black-ish,” as Rainbow’s mom.
You previously spoke about how your play “Notes From the Field” was the closest you’ve come to activism. Where does the rest of your work fall, on a scale between activism and objectivity?People labeled me an activist a long time ago. I didn’t call myself that. I think they did because two of my best-known works were about racial disruptions: “Fires in the Mirror,” about a conflict that happened in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that was almost entirely Black and Jewish people.
I think I’m a humanist. I call myself an activist with “Notes From the Field” because it’s examining something that I personally, fervently believe must be corrected: inequity in our public schools. It’s not just that kids have an economic disadvantage. It’s often also because they do not have what is considered to be a so-called “traditional functioning family.” The only place to be taken care of is the state, and the state is not doing a good job of that.
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