The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of December 13, 2025

I've Known Rivers

1941

William E. Smith

(American, 1913–1997)
linocut
Image: 19.6 x 19.4 cm (7 11/16 x 7 5/8 in.); Sheet: 40.6 x 30.4 cm (16 x 11 15/16 in.)
Severance and Greta Millikin Trust 2022.55
© William E. Smith
Catalogue raisonné: Teller 22; Salsbury, Benay, and Kruse 114
Location: Not on view

Did You Know?

This print was included in a 1942 exhibition of Karamu House artists organized at New York’s Associated American Artists Galleries and sponsored by a committee including cultural figures such as Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and Carl Van Vechten. The show traveled to Philadelphia’s Temple University and brought national attention to the Karamu House printmaking workshop.

Description

In this composition, which features a man reflecting on a shore, William E. Smith imagined the narrator of Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” who proclaims, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” The poem established Hughes’s reputation as a leading figure within the Harlem Renaissance—a flourishing of Black culture in upper Manhattan—when he wrote it as a teenager, the year after he graduated from Cleveland’s Central High School in 1920. Like many members of Karamu Artists Inc., Smith remained friends with Hughes after they worked together at Karamu House, and the writer later praised Smith’s ability to capture the “humor and pathos” of Black life.
  • 2022
    (Lusenhop Fine Art, Cleveland Heights, OH), sold to The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
    June 6, 2022-
    The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
  • Exhibit by Karamu Artists. Exh. Cat. New York: Associated American Artists, 1942.
    Salsbury, Britany, and Erin E. Benay. Karamu Artists Inc.: Printmaking, Race, and Community. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2025. Reproduced: p. 51, no. 21
  • Exhibit by Karamu Artists. Associated American Artists Galleries, New York (January 7–22, 1942); Temple University, Philadelphia (February 2–16, 1942).
  • {{cite web|title=I've Known Rivers|url=false|author=William E. Smith|year=1941|access-date=13 December 2025|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2022.55