"Actions for the Earth" Gallery Talk with Stephanie Smith: Block Museum - Northwestern University
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"Actions for the Earth" Gallery Talk with Stephanie Smith

museum gallery with a large, light fabric loosely draped from the ceiling and tannish floor cushions underneath
Katie West, Clearing, 2019, installation view, TarraWara Museum of Art. Photo: Andrew Curtis. Courtesy of the artist.
Tours
March
2
12:30 PM-1:30 PM

Event Details

Date & Time:

Sat March 2, 2024
12:30 PM-1:30 PM

Location:

The Block Museum of Art
40 Arts Circle Drive
Evanston, IL 60208

Audience:

Open to the public

Details:

Join consulting curator Stephanie Smith for an overview of the exhibition and an activation of artist Katie West’s participatory work Gently Give Attention, through the offering of tea to program participants. Tea will be shared within West's installation, Clearing. 

Block gallery talks explore exhibitions by posing multidisciplinary questions and perspectives, led by knowledge sharers across Northwestern and beyond.  

Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology is a traveling exhibition that considers kinship, healing, and restorative interventions as artistic practices and strategies to foster a deeper consciousness of our interconnectedness with the earth. 

Space at this program is limited to 25 and advance registration required.  

RSVP

 

About Stephanie Smith

photo of a white woman with curly grey, short hair and glasses, smiling while outside

Stephanie Smith is a Chicago-based curator, writer, and arts leader whose collaborative, socially engaged projects assert art’s power to envision and enact other futures. She values place-responsive, generous, and hospitable ways of working—honed through 25+ years of curatorial practice including senior roles at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and Institute for Contemporary Art in Richmond, Virginia. In 2022, Smith joined Awi’nakola (“we are one with the land and the sea”), a project based in British Columbia in which artists, scientists, and Indigenous knowledge keepers are seeking effective responses to the climate crisis and working together to regenerate land and culture.

Key curatorial projects include Rashid Johnson: Monument (ICA), Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art (Smart + tour, received Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award) and Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art (Smart + ICI + tour). Notable co-curated projects include Commonwealth (Beta-Local + Philadelphia Contemporary + ICA), Agora: 4th Athens Biennial, and Heartland (Smart + VanAbbemuseum). Smith teaches, writes, serves on the advisory board for MARCH, and was a contributing editor at Afterall journal. She served as Provostial Researcher at the University of Chicago’s Franke Institute for the Humanities (2022–2023), holds an MA from Rice University, and is researching Chicagoland—on long-term, place-based, artist-led projects in Chicago—for her PhD with the University of Amsterdam.

Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu