Note: This event was originally scheduled for February 13, but has been rescheduled to May 7.
Join ICI for a conversation with Chicago-based curator, writer, and arts leader Stephanie Smith, who will share insights from over 25 years exploring ecologically- and socially-engaged curatorial and artistic practices.
Smith’s talk will consider curatorial practice as an ecology—a series of networks and exchanges among collaborators, species, materials, and environments—and will address how her perspective has shifted since beginning independent work. Alongside key prior projects, Smith will highlight her current collaboration with the Awi’nakola Foundation, a new Indigenous-led foundation based in British Columbia that has assembled a cross-cultural group of artists, scientists, and knowledge-keepers, all working together to regenerate land and culture in BC and beyond.
Smith is a long-time ICI collaborator who has held many curatorial roles in the U.S. and Canada—including senior institutional positions at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University—and has recently made a shift toward independent practice. Almost twenty years ago, ICI and the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art launched Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, Smith’s groundbreaking exhibition at the intersection of contemporary art and sustainable design. This talk coincides with the opening of Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology—one of our newest exhibitions—at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art, which Smith is supporting as consulting curator.
This program is free and open to the public. Live ASL interpretation is available at this event. Please indicate in your RSVP if you require ASL interpretation.
__2001.jpg?w=1600)
__1999.jpg?w=1600)