When Alyce Smith Cooper was in fifth grade in southeast Riverside, a Hollywood agent looking for potential child actors asked young people to send in a picture.
Her grandmother had a difficult time seeing the arts as viable career and expressed as much. So Smith Cooper took the agent’s letter to her teacher, who bluntly dismissed the idea telling her, “little colored girls don’t have these opportunities, so don’t bother responding.”
“I just took the letter home and I buried it somewhere along with my ideas about what I could do,” the longtime Lincoln Park resident recalled during an interview this week.
Now Smith Cooper is a stage actor, a storyteller and a published poet who moved to San Diego as an adult in 1971. Recently she was one of 21 artists designated by the California Arts Council as a Legacy Artist Fellow.
The fellowship, which was awarded to three San Diegans, comes with a $50,000 award and is intended to recognize well-established artists with 10 or more years experience in a variety of artistic mediums who have demonstrated leadership and generated social impact through their work.
My future columns will spotlight other San Diegans so honored: actor and writer Macedonio Arteaga Jr. and painter and muralist Victor Ochoa.
Smith Cooper said this award encourages her to not only continue her artistic journey, but to continue to uplift others and help them explore their own creativity, especially young people.
“I’m so determined to establish a foundation for … young people who might not ever consider themselves having gifts that could be shared with the world,” Smith Cooper said.
Born in Santa Barbara and raised in Riverside, Smith Cooper never thought of herself as an elite artist, in part because when she grew up, life in the arts didn’t seem like a possibility.
Her grandparents, while recognizing her talent as a writer, were not exactly enthusiastic about her pursuing a career in the arts; they feared it wouldn’t provide stability.
Her grandfather had worked in silent movies and, although that life was glamorous at times, it was not easy for the family. At the time racial discrimination was rampant in the country; there were numerous barriers keeping Black women out of a variety of career opportunities.
So Smith Cooper became a nurse. In fact, she didn’t get involved in the arts until she was raising her children in Los Angeles. There she ed the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles, a neighborhood organization that popped up after the 1965 Watts Riots, offering theater performances and workshops for adults and kids.
“Acting became something that was a joyful pastime for me … because it was something we could all do together,” Smith Cooper said, referring to her children. “I became really excited about being on stage, and it was a family experience that grew into a community experience.”
After Smith Cooper got married and moved to San Diego in 1971, she took a five-year break from acting before being cast in her first play with the Southeastern Community Theatre, which was founded in the 1960s by some civically engaged community leaders and advocates including Rufus DeWitt and Dr. Robert Matthews.
Interestingly, the first play Smith Cooper performed in with the group — later renamed Common Ground Theatre — was “The Sty of the Blind Pig” alongside castmates Whoopi Goldberg and the late James Avery, best known for portraying Uncle Phil on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”
In the time since, she has performed at or partnered with many other venues throughout San Diego County including the Old Globe and the La Jolla Playhouse, where she currently is participating in a military playwrights project.
Aside from her art and working as a nurse, Smith Cooper has led diversity training, worked in classrooms and served as an ordained minister. In 2005, she was inducted into the San Diego Women’s Hall of Fame; the group described her as a “bridge builder.”
Smith Cooper has several projects related to storytelling she plans to use the Legacy award to .
One project already under way with her cousin and a group of friends is an effort to record stories of people they grew up with in their neighborhood in Riverside, lesser known residents who contributed to the community and residents who made a name on the national stage, such as urban planner and UC Berkeley professor Ed Blakely and artist Ed Bereal, whose artistic installation is installed at the Smithsonian.
“They, beyond the odds, have come forward out of this little segregated community in California to do things of national acclaim … and these communities exist across our country,” Smith Cooper said.
“So we want to be able to harvest these stories and put them on a platform where they can be accessed, for people who come after us, in case they’re wondering how did we make it through when people were killing us regularly with impunity and attempting to keep us out of the mainstream of life.
“Yet, we not only entered into it but thrived.”
Smith Cooper also hopes the award will help her continue her work with community college health departments, where she has been putting together workshops for at-risk students who are in danger of not matriculating.
The workshops run in the spirit of traditional African thought about how to be successful in life, which includes recognizing that one is not alone in this process. The workshops use storytelling as a tool; students interview people from their neighborhoods to get a better feel for the ways they survived and thrived during difficult times.
In the long run Smith Cooper hopes to ultimately set up a business or a foundation to the creative aspirations of young people, and she hopes San Diegans across the board will find ways big and small to the creativity of our youth.
“Invest in your youth and their artistic expressions,” she said. “Invest time, invest comion, and invest money. Help our youth to remain positive and use the positivity that they have, and acknowledge that they are indeed the amazing gifts in our communities.”
