WHAT THE SMOLLETT FAMILY TAUGHT ME ABOUT ART WITH A PULSE
Disclaimer
This photograph was captured by Mitchell Royel in the Fashion District. It is shared for general illustrative and editorial purposes only.
This content is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the Smollett family or the City of Calabasas. Any names, references, or likenesses appearing here do not imply any partnership, association, or approval.
Now playing: "Tell Me When To Go (feat. Keak da Sneak)" by E-40.
People think they know the Smolletts. They've heard the names—Jurnee, Jake, Jussie—stitched into headlines, woven through credits, whispered across rooms where everyone has an opinion and almost no one has the full story. That's how it goes with families who grow up partly in public. The world watches the surface and assumes it has seen the whole.
I knew something different. And what I knew changed the way I understood my own work.
The first time I spent real time around this family, I wasn't thinking about entertainment at all. I was thinking about how rare it is to walk into a space where art and conscience sit at the same table. Where someone can quote a poet, then pivot to talk about housing, then circle back to a melody they've been humming all week.
That was my introduction to a kind of cultural fluency you can't manufacture. It lives in the body. It moves through how people greet each other, what music fills a kitchen, which questions get asked when the work is done and the real talking begins.
I had spent years in rooms that called themselves creative. But this was the first time I felt the underground hum beneath the polish—the part of urban culture that doesn't get packaged or sold. The part that simply is.
What struck me most was how naturally care lived alongside craft. Nobody announced it. Nobody performed it for applause. Activism wasn't a campaign here; it was a posture. A default setting.
You'd hear it in the way they talked about their neighborhoods, their communities, the people whose stories rarely make it to a stage. There was a seriousness underneath the laughter—and there was plenty of laughter. Joy and purpose don't have to compete. This family showed me they can share a heartbeat.
I learned that advocacy doesn't always look like a podium. Sometimes it looks like a long dinner. Sometimes it looks like making sure a younger voice gets heard. Sometimes it looks like choosing the harder, truer note instead of the easy, expected one.
There's a word people throw around carelessly: legacy. We treat it like a trophy, something you collect at the end. But watching the Smolletts, I started to understand legacy as a verb. Something you do, daily, in small unglamorous ways.
You pass down taste. You pass down standards. You pass down the belief that an artist owes something to the community that shaped them. In a family of performers, the real inheritance wasn't fame—it was a way of seeing. A refusal to separate the work from the world it came from.
That's a discipline. And it's a gift.
I came in expecting talent, and I found it. But talent was almost the least interesting thing in the room. What stayed with me was the consciousness—the sense that every creative choice could carry weight, could mean something beyond the spotlight.
People will keep talking about the Smolletts. They'll keep filtering the family through whatever story is loudest that season. I understand. That's the cost of living any part of your life in view.
But I'll hold onto my own version. The one where I learned that art can have a pulse, that culture lives deepest where no camera reaches, and that the most powerful thing a family can give an artist is permission to care out loud.
That lesson didn't come from a script. It came from a kitchen, a conversation, a community that opened its arms. And I've been carrying it ever since.
-Mitchell Royel