Dr. Blair Ebony Smith

Core faculty

Assistant Professor of Art Education and Gender and Women's Studies

Contact

A light-brown skinned person wearing glasses, a blue mesh head covering, and a plaid shirt is DJing in a cozy record shop. They are adjusting controls on a mixer next to two turntables. Behind them, shelves display vinyl records, cassette tapes, and colorful album covers, adding to the creative and eclectic atmosphere.

About Dr. Smith

Blair Ebony Smith, PhD

Blair Ebony Smith is an artist-scholar and lover from Southside Richmond, Virginia. As a sound artist, DJ, and homegirl with Black girl celebratory collective/band, Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) We Levitate, Blair deepened her love for Black sound, music and making space for Black girlhood celebration with Black girls. Her art and scholarship explore themes of memory, loops, home, coalition, everlasting love, and sound/listening. She uses her lived experience and DJ/beat-making practice to take on Black (girlhood) study. Smith is the author of solo, co-written, and co-edited works in Wish to Live: Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy Reader, An Outkast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender and the Postmodern South, American Quarterly, and Visual Arts Research. She teaches classes focused on Black girl, femme, queer and feminist art, sound, pedagogy, play, and listening.

She is currently working on lovenloops: Time, Sound, Music, and Black Girlhood, an experimental book project centered on 4 thematic DJ mixes that explore the sounds, music, and digital creativity of Black girls and women engaged in creative and collective work of which she is a part. Recent exhibitions and curations include the Krannert Art Museum (Illinois) and the Luminary (St. Louis). She has performed as a DJ and sound artist with her bandmates across the nation at various institutions, and solo at Richmond Independent Radio, Institute of Contemporary Art VCU, Diggin in the Crates at Virginia Tech, and Slo’ Mo’ Queer Dance Party in Chicago, Illinois and more. Since 2014, She has composed sample-based sound art, beats, and loops under her alter ego, lovenloops released tracks on SoundCloud and Bandcamp, making music with lovers, friends, and homegirls. She released her first project, Don’t Ever Forget It with Soulvember Records (2016) based in Los Angeles, CA.

Education

B.A. in Sociology and Community Studies, The College of William and Mary

Ph.D. in Cultural Foundations of Education, Syracuse University

Research and publications

Ongoing and upcoming research

Individual tracks recorded from cassettes then live mixed and recorded onto a cassette // sitting with my tape collection of black (femme-"as a method of accumulating meaning beyond the normative" - Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley

This tape is produced on the occasion of Jen Everett’s exhibition, Could You Dim The Lights? at the Krannert Art Museum, Feb. 1st-Oct 5th 2024 co-curated by Amy L. Powell, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Curator of Arts Research. It is a joy what comes to light in conversation about memory, girlhood, and how the body remembers. Jen Everett and artist-co-curator, Blair Ebony Smith (lovenloops), extend and share the conversation about themes in the exhibition with each other beyond the museum gallery space in ways true to us.

I dedicate this track to Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown, SOLHOT We Levitate, and the most dopest and humble person and poet, Nikky Finney, for blessing me with the vocals from Nikky Finney’s contributions to SOLHOT Presents: Black Girl Genius Week (BGGW) at the University of Illinois- Urbana Champaign (Nov. 3-8th, 2014). I dedicate this to SOLHOT homegirls, We Levitate (Dr. Beezy, (Queen) Jessica, Pretty Black)), BGGW, black girls and black people , elders, and ancestors everywhere. “Go on, Black Girl, levitate…”

We offer a multimedia musical ritual experience about doing SOLHOT (saving our lives hear our truths), a collective practice of celebrating Black girlhood in all of its complexity. To name the ideas that matter most to us in SOLHOT: ghosts, generations, living, forgiveness, failure, grace, wisdom, movement, health, fun, love, freedom we creatively engage song, verse, poetry, and image to heal some past hurts and feel ourselves beautiful through each other’s voice, touch, rhythm, and heart beats. Each utterance of the discrete (& discontinuous) value and violence we resist through our work and those we are also complicit in are animated through our performance to position all of us the other side of the wellness question, in order to remake SOLHOT useful to more people. This next level practice of SOLHOT sounds, beats, and bumps like afrofuturist black girl magic because it is both the art and science of black girl genius. We are unapologetically using digital wrongly to reimagine the collective, resound complex Black girlhood, remember relationships, reclaim the dirty work, and reverberate love for self, each other, and every kind of Black girl every where.