General Idea
Life & Work by Sarah E.K. Smith
About the Author
Sarah E.K. Smith
Sarah E.K. Smith is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral
Fellow at Harvard University, where she is affiliated with the Transnational Studies
Initiative at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She is also Affiliated
Faculty at Queen’s University, where she works with graduate students in the
Department of Art History & Art Conservation and in the Cultural Studies program. As an
The work of General Idea
art historian, her practice encompasses writing, curating, and teaching. Her research is
captured my attention when I
centred on contemporary art, with a specific focus on socially and politically engaged art
was an art student in Kingston
in Canada.
and learned that the faux
Smith received her PhD in Art History from Queen’s University and in 2014 was
destruction of The 1984 Miss
awarded the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal. She has worked as an
General Idea Pavillion had been
independent curator and held the position of Curator of Contemporary Art at the Agnes
enacted in a performance in the
Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario. Major exhibition projects to date include
very city I was living in. As a
I’m Not Myself At All: Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell, 2015; Sorting Daemons: Art,
collective, General Idea had an
Surveillance Regimes and Social Control, 2010–11, co-curated with Jan Allen; and
enormous impact—within
Conversation Pieces, 2008. In 2015, Smith was the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Visiting
Canada and internationally—
Research Chair in Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California in Los
through their work and their
Angeles.
efforts to shape the Canadian
art scene. I am interested in the
activism of the group, how they
used visual culture to critique
the structures of the art world,
and, most prominently, how
they explored issues
surrounding AIDS.
–
Sarah E.K. Smith
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