Visual and Studio Arts Lecture Series: Amy Smith-Stewart

Amy Smith-Stewart is Chief Curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Since 2013 she has organized more than forty-five exhibitions and projects at the Museum. Her unique perspective has brought artists to The Aldrich during important stages of their careers including first time solo museum presentations with artists Hangama Amiri, Chiffon Thomas, Hayal Pozanti, Milano Chow, Lucia Hierro, Genesis Belanger, B. Wurtz, Eva LeWitt, and Jessi Reaves, and survey shows with Jackie Winsor, Frank Stella, Ruth Root, Suzanne McClelland, Harmony Hammond, and Karla Knight. Harmony Hammond: Material Witness, Five Decades of Art was named one of the best exhibitions of 2019 by the New York Times. The show traveled to the Sarasota Art Museum and was accompanied by the artist’s first monograph. Encompassing the entirety of the museum, 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, which Smith-Stewart co-curated, revisited the historic exhibition, Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists, organized by Lucy R. Lippard in 1971 and joined it with a new roster of twenty-six female identifying and nonbinary emerging artists to track the evolution of feminist art practices over half a century. It was accompanied by a 200-page book. Current exhibitions on view include Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers, co-organized with the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Chiffon Thomas: The Cavernous, and Ping Zheng: Where Memories of Travels Go. Hangama Amiri’s exhibition, Homage to Home travels to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, where it will open in January 2024.

Smith-Stewart has organized more than eighty exhibitions in museums, collections, galleries, and temporary spaces. She is founder of the eponymous nomadic curatorial project, Smith-Stewart, previously located on the Lower East Side from 2007-2009. She began her career as a curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), where she mounted nineteen exhibitions and projects including first time solo museum presentations with artists Adrian Paci, Mika Rottenberg, Taryn Simon, and Aleksandra Mir, as well as group exhibitions including Day Labor and Greater New York 2005 (cocurated). From 2006-2007, she was a Curatorial Advisor for the Mary Boone Gallery, where she organized a series of group exhibitions introducing a new generation of artists to the Gallery. She has organized exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park and the Noguchi Museum and was the 2006-2008 Guest Curator for the Peter Norton Collection. She has served on faculty at the School of the Visual Arts, MFA Fine Arts department, and the Sotheby’s Institute of Art MA Contemporary Art program. Her writing has appeared in books and catalogues published by Taschen, Gregory R. Miller & Co., Revolver Publishing, Bates College Museum of Art, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Charta, Perrotin, among others.