The Timeless Appeal of Tommie Smith, Who Knew a Podium Could Be a Site of Protest

What happens when a person begins forging new symbols, built upon the defining symbol of his youth? The 49-year-old Kaino, with Smith’s active partnership, has produced multiple works of art inspired by the 1968 protest — installations and sculptures, and now an Emmy-nominated documentary, “With Drawn Arms” (2020), which Kaino co-directed with Afshin Shahidi, that charts Smith’s evolution in the public consciousness from pariah to paragon. Kaino understands the art they make together as both a matter of aesthetics and a mechanism for restorative justice. A vivid example of this work is “19.83 (Reflection)” (2013), a full-scale re-creation of the Olympic podium plated in gold; when properly lighted, it casts three ghostly reflections on the wall behind it. “Invisible Man (Salute)” (2018), when approached from behind, appears to be a traditional statue of Smith with raised fist; after walking around it, though, one is confronted by a mirrored front surface, which creates the illusion that the monument has vanished from sight. Both works play with presence and absence, a tribute to how Smith, once banished, defiantly endures.

Kaino admits that he knew Smith “first as a symbol.” After learning in high school about Smith and Carlos’s demonstration, Kaino grasped onto their act as an example of the kind of impact — and the kind of art — he hoped to make. As Kaino’s career flourished, he kept a photograph of the demonstration taped to his iMac. “That symbol, that image works on a number of different levels: emotionally, artistically, politically,” he explains. “And it is my aspiration as an artist to have my work function on a number of different levels, too. So that picture was the high bar — an impossibly high bar.”

Kaino connected with Smith serendipitously after a friend and collaborator working in his studio, Michael Jonte, noticed the image and said, matter-of-factly, “Oh, that’s Coach Smith.” Smith had coached Jonte on the track team at Santa Monica College before moving south, to Stone Mountain, Ga. Soon Jonte and Kaino were on a flight to Atlanta. For Kaino, it was a near-spiritual pilgrimage. He had no specific intention in mind, certainly no vision of what their collaboration and friendship would become. “I never meet someone with the assumption that I deserve their story,” Kaino says. He went, instead, “to try to learn his story; to try to earn his story.”

Smith may not consider himself an artist (“Glenn makes the art,” Smith says, “he has the mind for it.”), but he thinks like one. As a child of nine or 10 years old, working in the California cotton fields with his family, he was drawn to discarded things. “Something laying on the ground or hanging out of a tree,” he says. “I wondered sometimes how a soda pop can got that far out in the boonies. So I’d pick the can up, take it home, and throw it under the house so it had a place to stay.” Through collection, he exercised a curatorial eye and a preservationist instinct. He saw the beauty and the dignity in broken things.

In his years of training his body to achieve world-class speed (at one time, he held 11 world records), Smith exercised his mind as well. In hearing Smith describe his race preparation and execution, Kaino recognized his own artistic praxis. “I’ll make drawings, but I’ll imagine the whole thing and then as we [Kaino and his team] execute them, we’re bringing to life what’s already in our head, that we’ve already imagined,” Kaino says. This exercise of the imagination — whether in athletics or in art — is the foundation of the pair’s shared partnership. “He understands me,” Smith says of Kaino. “I can tell him something and he’ll take it and make it better. It’s a lot of work, but it’s fun work. It’s like training to compete.”

NINETEEN SIXTY-EIGHT was a shattering year in America. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April; Bobby Kennedy, in June. Overseas, 17,000 American soldiers, many of them Black and brown, died in Vietnam; at home, the antiwar movement surged, culminating in violent clashes with law enforcement in Chicago during August’s Democratic convention; the segregationist George Wallace, running as a third-party candidate, was in September polling at 20 percent nationally and would go on to capture five Southern states in the general election; and the summer Olympics in Mexico City, pushed to the fall on account of the heat, was already being called, in the words of a September 30 Sports Illustrated cover story, “The Problem Olympics.”