Marlene Smith was born in Birmingham, England into a family of African descent in 1964. She studied art from 1983–87 at Bradford College and became one of the key figures of the BLK Art Group, formed in the early 1980s by a radical group of young black artists, including Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper and Donald Rodney. She became Director at the Black-Art Gallery in 1992, helping to organise its first exhibition of Asian artists. She has also served as director of West Midlands Minority Arts Service, as director of The Public in West Bromwich and as a lead researcher in a number of Black-art focussed academic projects.
Artist and curator Marlene Smith was born in Birmingham, England in 1964 into a family of African descent. During her A Levels, she decided to research black art for an independent study project. However, her teachers were concerned ‘that I would not be able to find any black artists, because they didn’t exist’ (Paul Mellon Centre talk). She then began connecting with several key figures, including Vanley Burke, Frank Bowling and Ronald Moody. In 1982 she attended the opening of The Pan Afrikan Connection: An Exhibition by Young Black British Artists at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. This show was arranged by a collective of art students from the Midlands who initially formed Wolverhampton Young Black Artists, which then evolved into the Pan-Afrikan Connection, which in turn became the BLK Art Group, whose radical members included Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper and Donald Rodney. Its ethos was inspired by a determination, in the words of Rodney, to challenge the ‘general collapse of the black spirit of self ’ by working 'to produce something of immense value to the Black psyche: we must now build a new and positive self-image’ (Bernier 2016, p. 236). In 1982, Smith joined the group and co-organised the first National Art Convention in Wolverhampton and the Working Convention for Radical Black Art in Nottingham in 1984. Smith herself studied art from 1983–87 at Bradford College. In 1986 she collaborated with Piper to curate The Image Employed: The Use of Narrative in Black Art. Following the disbanding of the BLK group, Smith became assistant curator at The Black-Art Gallery (BAG) in London's Finsbury Park in 1982. Here she openly critiqued the African and African-Caribbean focus maintained by her predecessor and invited Asian artists to show at the gallery (Chambers 2014, p. 122). After an interlude as the Director of West Midlands Minority Arts Service, Smith returned to the BAG as Director in 1991 and her first exhibition, Colours of Asia (1992), featured 11 artists of Asian origin.
As an artist, moving beyond an early phase of intense, violent imagery, Smith's later work embodies a sense of shared closeness through the use of memorabilia, including old photographs, in collaged paintings and mixed-media installations, which allow her to explore the process of history-making. She declared that ‘my personal take on art [...] is that it is always political. Part of the politics we live in is the politics of race, so inescapable. I think that when you put a body in a piece of work, you inadvertently speak about race. I think that when you put a black body in a piece of work, it is racialised’ (Nottingham Contemporary). Smith's mixed-media work, Good Housekeeping I, showcased in the influential The Thin Black Line exhibition curated by Lubaina Himid at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1985, exemplified many of her concerns. It featured the use of found materials and an engagement with black feminism through a powerful critique of the racist policing practices that resulted in the shooting of Dorothy 'Cherry' Groce, during a raid on her Brixton home. Smith stated in her exhibition text that she sought to ‘contribute to the building of a material culture that might have been denied' (O’Kane 2013, p. 284). In Art History (1987, Sheffield Museums), Smith created an assemblage comprising four small framed images, including of photographer Brenda Agard, with a vase of plastic flowers nestled within a crocheted jacket crafted by Smith's mother. The postcard-sized images were exhibited in clip-frames, evoking the domestic interior, specifically referencing the female sphere and focusing on the experiences of Black women.
Smith became director of the short-lived arts venue, The Public, in West Bromwich in 2008 (which controversially closed in 2013). From 2005-10 Smith was a NESTA International Cultural Leadership Fellow (National Endowment for Science Technology & Art). In 2011, alongside Piper and Johnson, Smith formed the Black Art Research Project, to examine the archives and historical legacies of the BLK art group and the Black British Arts Movement. From 2015-18 Smith completed her PhD in art history at the University of the Arts, London, during which time she was UK research manager for the AHRC-funded Black Artists Modernism Project (BAM), a research scheme focusing on the relationship between the work of artists of African descent and modernism, run by the University of the Arts London and Middlesex University. In 2017, she participated in the exhibition The Please is Here at Nottingham Contemporary, which explored Black British culture and politics from the 1980s. Her work was also featured in Get Up, Stand Up Now (Somerset House, London, 2019) and Cut & Mix (New Art Exchange, Nottingham, 2022). Smith has been an associate artist at Modern Art Oxford. In the UK public domain Marlene Smith's work is represented in Sheffield Museums.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Marlene Smith]
Publications related to [Marlene Smith] in the Ben Uri Library