Susan Smith, Owen Smith featured in Press Herald article on activist art
The Portland Press Herald published a feature article on Susan Smith, assistant director of the intermedia master of fine arts program at the University of Maine. Since February, Smith and her husband have traveled from their home in Dover-Foxcroft to the U.S. border with Mexico, and visited refugee detention centers in Florida and Texas, where children and others are being held, according to the article. She has created art at those facilities and won national recognition for her work, including a fabric piece from El Paso, called “The Passage: Mourning Cloth,” which received the Juror’s Award from the Surface Design Association for its upcoming International Exhibition in Print in the fall, the article states. At UMaine, Smith also coordinates exhibitions at the Lord Hall Gallery. Her specialty is socially engaged art, which is a requirement of second-year MFA students, said Owen Smith, director of the intermedia program and no relation to Susan. Socially and politically engaged art has been part of the curriculum at UMaine for many years, he said, and has taken on more urgency in recent years with the impact on local communities of such global issues as migration, displacement and climate change. Some students pursue it as a major, others set it aside, “but it’s certainly part of a range of ideas that any contemporary artist needs to be aware of,” he said. Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel carried the Press Herald story.