Eli Wizevich

Reporter

The 200-meter dash at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics lasted 19.8 seconds, and gold medalist Tommie Smith’s world record lasted 11 years. But the image of Smith and bronze medalist John Carlos on the podium, two Black American men with their heads bowed and their gloved fists raised in the air in support of human rights, has lasted throughout the five decades since.

Bridge, an installation by conceptual artist Glenn Kaino in collaboration with Smith, opens at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on July 26 and considers the gesture’s symbolism, meaning and endurance through time.

The 100-foot-long installation, made with fiberglass, steel and wire, features 200 casts of Smith’s raised arm and fist, painted gold and suspended from the ceiling. Viewed from a distance, the golden Bridge is one long, flowing, arching sculpture.

The first time that the museum’s contemporary art curator Sarah Newman saw Bridge, at a temporary installation across town, she was stumped. “I couldn’t quite figure out what it was,” she says, “and then I got closer, and I realized it was human.”

Bridge, in Luce
Bridge hangs from the ceiling of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Luce Foundation Center. Albert Ting / Smithsonian American Art Museum

For many years, Smith’s legacy was similarly abstracted between his identity as an icon and as a human. He—or his fist—became a symbol, plastered on T-shirts and posters.

Kaino tells a similar story about how he came to steward Smith’s legacy. He had a black-and-white photo of Smith, Carlos and Peter Norman, the white Australian silver medalist who stood in solidarity on the podium, taped on the corner of his computer. He’s had it “really for as long as I’ve been an artist,” Kaino says. “Many, many years ago now.”

“I had it as an inspirational image without having that much knowledge about Tommie's real time existence,” he adds.

One day, over ten years ago, Kaino’s friend walked into the studio and pointed at the photo. He knew the Olympian personally and offered to introduce Kaino to the man he called “Coach Smith.”

Things moved quickly. A few days later, Smith and Kaino were chatting amicably in the gold medalist’s living room in Atlanta. But it was unclear to Smith and his wife, Delois, what a conceptual artist from California was doing on their couch.

“It strikes me you live in a bit of a time bubble,” Kaino recalls telling Smith. “For me, it’s always been a symbol. But for you, it’s highly personal. You shook my hand with a hand you brush your teeth with … but for the rest of us, we still have your hand up in the air. What if we could collaborate on a project allowing you to be a witness for the first time?”

Smith went to Kaino’s Los Angeles studio, where the artist made a silicone mold of his arm. Now that Smith could witness his own arm from afar, the two men explored the forms it could take.

“I came up with the idea for the Bridge after I went to the toy store and I bought some action figurines that had a little closed fist,” Kaino says. “I had a whole stack of arms I was making models with, working through several different versions of bridges.”

Kaino and Smith’s multiyear collaboration has resulted in public appearances together, a documentary and the dramatic centerpiece Bridge, which was created in 2013 and has now found a permanent home at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

With Drawn Arms
Artist Glenn Kaino and Olympic gold medalist Tommie Smith during the filming of the documentary With Drawn Arms Afshin Shahidi / © Glenn Kaino

“It’s an opportunity for Tommie Smith to reinscribe both his initial intentions with the action and also his own intentional journey,” says Adam Bradley, a writer and literary scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In ’68, Smith’s initial intentions and the meaning of the gesture quickly got away from him. Some critics took the protest as “a shame and a disgrace,” arguing that “there is no place for personal spleen or politics in the Olympic Games.” Others thought it was an endorsement of Black separatism.

In reality, Smith and Carlos intended the gesture to be about human rights, using their platform atop the podium to further the longstanding relationship between protesting injustice and athletics.

“I knew going into the event that something needed to be done,” Smith said in 2021. “Raising my arm meant pride, it meant togetherness—all of us—as a nation.”

“It was a moment of tremendous, tremendous tumult. And these men really violated American custom and American protocol by offering this protest,” says Damion Thomas, the curator of sports at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). “But what gives it its significance is that there’s a larger movement surrounding it.”

Smith and Carlos were fully aware of their context. Every detail of the protest was planned. In an article for the New York Times, Bradley called it “a grand display of performance, of art and of performance art.”

Smith, Carlos and Norman all wore buttons for the Olympic Project for Human Rights. Smith and Carlos took their shoes off to illustrate poverty among Black Americans. Carlos wore a necklace of beads to commemorate Black victims of racist violence and lynching. Smith even flexed a small muscle in his wrist that becomes prominent when picking cotton.

1968 Olympics
Gold medalist Tommie Smith (center) and bronze medalist John Carlos (right) each raise a clenched fist and bow their heads during the U.S. national anthem as a human rights protest, while they stand on the podium with Australian silver medalist Peter Norman (left) at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Bettmann / Getty Images

These details embed the events of 1968 in a longer lineage of Black protest for civil and human rights. Physical evidence of this enduring protest is on view at NMAAHC, including Smith’s tracksuit, button and the olive branch handed to him at the medal ceremony, which he held on the podium.

“Back in 1968,” Smith told Vanity Fair in 2019, “the need was for young people, especially young Black men, to take a stand on issues which had not been touched before.”

Their protest did not come without a cost. Upon their return from Mexico City, Smith and Carlos were barred from further international competition and faced prejudice and hardships at home. Smith struggled to find employment, bouncing between coaching jobs and a stint on the Cincinnati Bengals practice squad.

“I put locks on the hood of my car because I was afraid people would put bombs in my car. I was trying to protect myself and my wife,” Smith told Allison Keyes of Smithsonian magazine in 2016. “We had rocks thrown through the window, phone calls and people would send us tickets telling us to go back to Africa.”

With time, the men’s protest has become more widely accepted, but modern examples of Black protest in sports are still faced with a similar hostility.

The artifacts at NMAAHC offer a striking connection to Bridge and propose similar questions of art, legacy and history. “What you are trying to do is give people multiple entries,” Thomas says. “Each museum deals with these questions of protest and patriotism and challenging conventions in their own powerful way.”

The items represent the human scale, using objects worn by Smith to tell his story as part of a larger narrative about American history. The sculpture repeats the human element hundreds of times, allowing it to transcend into something monumental, abstract and moving, shimmering with gold, hanging high above the gallery floor.

Bridge, fist details
The Bridge is 100 feet long, and features 200 casts of Smith’s raised arm. Lucia RM Martino and Tucker Garrison / Smithsonian American Art Museum

In both cases, the visitor is forced to reckon with the art of the protest—the objects and details that composed it at the time, and the profound, symbolic legacy it would leave behind.

“I think that Tommie Smith and John Carlos chose the mode of their protest knowing that it likely would be misinterpreted, maybe consciously,” Bradley says. “But just because something can be left open to unscrupulous people manipulating it should not keep us from doing the right things. … That’s part of the price we pay for those freedoms.”

Get the latest on what's happening At the Smithsonian in your inbox.

Eli Wizevich

Eli Wizevich is a reporting intern for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.