Sally Smart

Sally Jane Smart (born 29 March 1960) is an Australian contemporary artist known for her large-scale assemblage installations that incorporate a range of media, including felt cut-outs, painted canvas, drawings, screen-printing, printed fabric and photography, performance and video. Her art addresses gender and identity politics and questions the relationships between body and culture, including trans-national ideas that shaped cultural history. She has exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally, and her works are held in major galleries in Australia and around the world.

Early life and education Smart was born in 1960, in Quorn, South Australia. Her great-aunt was Bessie Davidson, an Australian-born artist whose success in France in the first half of the twentieth century encouraged Smart in her determination to become an artist. and completed a Post-graduate Diploma in Painting at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne (1988), followed by a Master of Fine Arts in 1991, also at the Victorian College of the Arts. By the 1990s, "cutting and pasting ha come to the fore" in Smart's work, Her 1996/1997 work, The Unhomely Body, reflects in its title "the idea of something being unsettling because it contains the familiar rendered unfamiliar, through the emergence of what was previously suppressed. Here the domestic environment is acknowledged as the historical site of female confinement."

Smart has exhibited internationally, including at the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore; Wooyang Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; Galeri Canna, Jakarta; Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan; Dark Heart: 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; The Pedagogical Puppet Contemporary Galleries, University of Connecticut, USA; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, New York; and Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China.

Smart lives and works Melbourne, Victoria. Sackler Fellow Artist-in Residence, University of Connecticut, USA (2012) Australia Council Fellowship (2014) Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Melbourne (2017) Member of the Order of Australia (2026) for significant service to the arts as an administrator, educator and visual artist.

Other roles Trustee at the National Gallery of Victoria from 2001 to 2008. Board member (Deputy Chair) at the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) from 2016 to 2019.

Selected exhibitions

Solo exhibitions (selection) Smart has exhibited extensively throughout Australia 1999, Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan The Exquisite Pirate 2006, Postmasters Gallery, New York 2006, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide Decoy Nest 2008, Postmasters Gallery, New York 2011, Greenaway Art Gallery, Melbourne, Australia 2013, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, Australia 2016, Postmasters Gallery, New York 2017, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, Australia 2018, Tony Raka Art Gallery, Ubud, and P.A.R.A.D.E. at BIASA, Kerobokan, Indonesia The Shadow Trees Sculpture Installation, 2014, Victoria Harbour, Docklands, Melbourne, Australia 2013 COLLECTIVE IDENTITY(IeS): THIS IS THAT TIME – Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery 2002 Arid Arcadia: art of the Flinders Ranges, Art Gallery of South Australia 1998 Unhomely, Wooyang Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea

Collections National Gallery of Australia, Canberra National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide GOMA/Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, New Zealand Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, New York, USA British Museum, London, UK