Smart Salon: The World according to Robert Earl Paige
Robert Earl Paige in conversation with Laura Steward
Monday, November 4, 5:30PM
Smart Museum of Art
Free, register online here
The Open Practice Committee and Smart Museum of Art invite you to join a conversation with Curator of Public Art, Laura Steward, and South Side artist Robert Earl Paige where the two will discuss his newly-commissioned installation Give the Drummer Some! and his decades-long practice as an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator.
Multi-disciplinary artist and arts educator Robert Earl Paige lives and works in Woodlawn, on the South Side of Chicago, where he was born in 1936. He is one of very few artists who participated not only in the Black Arts Movement, but also in the Chicago Bauhaus, while working at Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill in the 1960s. Following his education in textile design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he went on to an international career in design, while at the same time nurturing the art scene on the South Side. He was given a retrospective at the Hyde Park Art Center in the summer of 2024.
Laura Steward is Curator of Public Art at the University of Chicago and Smart Museum. Her recent projects include Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity in fall 2023. A specialist in commissioning works of art, she joined UChicago in 2017. Previously she served as Phillips Director and Chief Curator of SITE Santa Fe and founding curator of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). She is the author of many exhibition catalogues, occasional lecturer at UChicago, and a graduate of Harvard College and the Williams/Clark Program in the History of Art.
Co-presented with the Smart Museum of Art, with an introduction by Ian Brundige, Art Design Chicago Engagement Fellow