Intermedia MFA assistant director’s art highlighting refugee crisis wins international award

Susan Smith, professor and assistant director of the University of Maine’s Intermedia MFA program, was selected to win the Juror’s Award from the Surface Design Association’s International Exhibit 2019 for her work titled “The Passage.”

The installation piece consists of artifacts from social practice-based work at the Texas-Mexico border. Through a mourning cloth and various sculptures, the installation commemorates the harrowing journeys of countless migrants traveling to the United States. It is one of a series of pieces designed to address the worldwide refugee crisis, according to Smith.

“What is important to me is that I think of these actions as artworks, but what is just as important to me is that these artworks engage with what is happening here and now,” says Smith, who focuses on collaborative approaches to addressing social injustice through art.

Smith’s sculptures were created from border wall fragments embedded with fiber, clothing and items left behind by migrants that bring their journeys to life. The mourning cloth features printing and boro-stitching, a Japanese method of visibly mending textiles.

The installation also had a final performance, held on the international bridge between Juárez and El Paso, in which Smith used a broom to attempt in vain to sweep away a shadow cast by a barbed wire fence.

“The urgency of these times calls to me for art that is more action than artifact: when I do create an object from the experience, I intend to disturb you,” Smith says.

The Surface Design Association is an international nonprofit that promotes creativity, innovation and artistic excellence in textile-inspired art and design.

The fall issue of the association’s journal featuring the work of Smith and other artists will be available in September.

Smith’s work also will be part of a series of pieces on global migration on exhibit this fall at the Jerusalem Fund Museum in Washington, D.C. That exhibit will be in collaboration with Sharif Elmusa, a poet who also teaches at the American University in Cairo.

Contact: Cleo Barker, 207.581.3729