A wave of applause and adorating cheer rippled through the foyer of the San Jose Museum of Art Friday night as the crowd surged to swarm the entrance.
The guest of honor had arrived.
As Olympic gold medalist Tommie Smith made his way into the museum, with his wife Delois Jordan Smith and artist Glenn Kaino close to him, he stopped every few feet to shake a hand or embrace a friend. He found his way to the small podium and took a moment to thank the people he felt brought him there.
“Thank you Dr. Harry Edwards, Ken Noel and all the people who served the purpose of the Olympic project,” Smith said. “Now you see this is the end.”
Smith’s exhibition at the museum is a multi-year collaboration of art and philosophy with Kaino through multimedia; while several pieces have been shown throughout the United States, all the pieces were brought together for the first time for the special show Friday night.
“We started on a journey about changing history and the story has taken us all the way to the Oval Office with President [Barack] Obama, to Mexico City, to Atlanta, to Chicago, to New York,” Kaino said. “Amazing journey that we’ve been on and it all culminates tonight.”
Smith thanked the museum audience for their patience in waiting for him to arrive. He had just flown straight from Colorado Springs, Colorado to make it on time.
“This is my town, this is my city!” Smith said.
Just hours earlier, Smith and fellow Olympic medalist John Carlos were inducted into the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame. The induction came 51 years after their iconic victory stand protest ended their track careers, but not their enduring work in civil rights activism.
“I have seven sisters,” Smith said. “This [induction] came to be because the Olympic committee is now heralded by two women. That’s all I can say before I start crying.”
Smith and Kaino led the procession up to the second floor. The exhibition opens in a central room, with a single piece seemingly hovering above the audience’s heads.
Dozens of golden forearms, sculpted to mimic Smith’s own arm, are arranged in a cascading wavelength across the enormous room. The gleam of the piece named “Bridge” outshines everything else in the room, rimming it in darkness.
The exhibition, “With Open Arms,” is Smith’s first foray into art. Kaino explained to the audience that he and Smith wanted to extrapolate the meaning of protest and separate the symbol from the college student who created it.
When Smith walked to the next room of the gallery, his attention turned immediately to the luminous golden rendition of the 1968 medal podium and he made a beeline for it.
Ignoring the low-hanging barricades and the “do not touch” sign, Smith took ahold of Kaino’s hand and stepped onto the top platform, a position he is undoubtedly familiar with, and brandished the glass award he received from the Olympic induction ceremony.
The performance screamed of something deeply victorious and meta. The crowd roared with cheer.
Framed on the center wall of one of the rooms is a simplistic neutral line drawing of the victory protest illustrated by Smith.
Kaino told the audience that once Smith had started to draw, they could not pull him away from the art.
“I couldn’t explain it,” Smith said. “I closed my eyes and my hands couldn’t move fast enough. I went outside my mind to do that and it felt good because I had never done that before.”
Smith then guided the crowd around, stopping intermittently at photographs and drawings, specifically one of the 1968 track relay team.
Kaino said they had made two copies of that particular drawing and given one to former President Obama in the Oval Office. Smith had signed the back of the canvas with an inscription meant just for the President.
“The eight years he spent in office, he never dropped the baton,” Smith said. He said he was honored to hear the former President use that particular phrase in a speech just a few days earlier at a foundation dinner Smith attended in Chicago.
Smith hopes to pass the baton to a younger generation as well, as he stressed the multigenerational theme of the exhibit.
“The change has started,” Smith said. “The global change of excitement, in terms of young folks moving forward and not giving a damn what anybody says about them because they use their minds now.”
Smith still feels compelled to push the same message 51 years later.
“I’m going to keep speaking until I can’t speak anymore about moving forward,” he said.
Smith said he hasn’t seen the movement that he thought young people would have started by now, half a century after his protest.
“Any faucet you turn on is low,” Smith said. “That’s my thinking. It hasn’t been turned on high enough for everybody to get wet with knowledge.”
Another art piece encourages the interaction of artistic voyeur. Titled “Invisible Man,” it is a dual-faceted sculpture. Half is a 3D mold of Smith’s iconic stance, while the flip side is a flat mirror which reflects back one’s own visage.
The piece harkens back to Kaino’s opening remarks about their open interpretation of the nature of protest. Smith said he experienced most of his life as an outsider after his expulsion from the Olympic Games.
“You can’t move forward without sacrifice,” Smith said.
On Saturday the museum hosted Community Day with free admission for everyone.
Among the attending crowd were San Jose residents Carlos, his wife Laurie, their two daughters and their grandchildren. The family asked that their last name not be published for political reasons.
Carlos explained that he was in Mexico City at the time of Smith and Carlos’ protest. Carlos was in his high school’s press corps during what he described as “controversial times” when students were facing extreme violence.
He described narrowly missing the Tlatelolco massacre during the Mexican Dirty War, when students rose up to protest the 1968 Olympics and other social issues plaguing Mexico.
“In Mexico in 1968, they disappeared a lot of my classmates,” Carlos said. “We didn’t know what happened to them. They took them to labor concentration camps and exterminated them and it resulted in mass graves everywhere.”
Carlos said the juxtaposition of the Olympic Games in socially turbulent Mexico was the perfect place to make such a demonstration.
“There were mixed feelings. There was the reality we were facing as students next to the big event, the national exposure of these athletes protesting, especially for the Black Power movement.”
Carlos said he agreed wholeheartedly with Smith, believing young people to hold the key to change.
“I think there’s more international exposure,” Carlos said. “News travels faster. People all over the world are watching them. Governments are more conscious of that.”
Samuel Jimenez, a San Jose resident, also visited the museum with his son. Smith and Kaino’s intent of cross-generational exposure resonated with Jimenez.
“I don’t think it’s a continued message and that’s unfortunate,” Jimenez said. “I think people should recognize what this symbol means. It’s part of our history. Kids these days, millennials and what not, should be taught what this is and how far we’ve come.”
Smith echoed a similar sentiment regarding the importance of the next generation.
“We need the civil entities of the system, which are the young people, to start a proactive movement,” Smith said. It’s them moving forwards, resolving the status quo.”
