(1964 - )
Marlene Smith was born in Birmingham in 1964. A founder member of the Blk Art Group, formed in Wolverhampton in 1979, she has since worked as an artist, researcher and curator. Smith was UK Research Manager for the AHRC-funded Black Arts and Modernism (BAM) project at the University of the Arts London from 2015 to 2018, where she was also a PhD candidate researching the exhibition history of women during the Black Arts Movement. Recent group exhibitions include The More Things Change… at Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 2023, an exhibition reuniting key artists of the Blk Art Group; Portals, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, in 2021; Get Up, Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers, Somerset House, London, in 2019; and The Place Is Here at Nottingham Contemporary, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and the South London Gallery in 2017, which traced the urgent conversations taking place between Black artists, writers and thinkers during the 1980s.
