continued her musical journey, participating in many choral groups. A basic design course led her to the college art gallery and an exhibition of abstract expressionism that she never forgot. She also remembers performances by John Cage and Merce Cunningham, art that was removed from her conservative small-town upbringing. Like many women of the 1950s generation, she married right out of college and started a family. Eventually she and her family moved to Levittown, N.Y., a new community that offered her easy access to Manhattan where she saw exhibitions that made an impact on her — such as an early show of Kandinsky’s work at the Guggenheim Museum. While caring for two small children at home she found time to teach herself machine embroidery, following instructions in several women’s magazines and books from the local library. This brought creativity, something she had been missing, back into her life. In addition, a friend introduced her to the feminist writings of Betty Freidan, and through her husband she became involved in the Human Potential Movement of the late 60s. After a move to the Chicago area and 10 years of marriage, Smith and her husband divorced. While living near Chicago Smith took correspondence courses in teaching contemporary embroidery and design from the National Standards Council of American Embroiderers, and joined a local embroiderers’ guild. Guilds were a way to learn about stitching and design, with visiting teachers and lecturers and workshops providing opportunities to learn skills and techniques, something that universities were not teaching at that time. Smith refers to the guild as “an educational underground” and for about 20 years she was part of the itinerant teachers who traveled to teach, often internationally, for the guilds. She also studied with Chicago designer and embroiderer, Henry Stahmer, who emphasized making collages to begin a design and translate them into fabric and thread. Smith remarried in 1970 and eventually returned to college for graduate school at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. One teacher, Barbara Krug, encouraged her to go in the direction of painting on cotton and linen fabric and machine stitching, a combination that has been a constant as her work has evolved. Several years later perhaps one of the most important changes was discovering the material she uses for her art. In the late 80s Smith saw an advertisement offering artists three yards of a nonwoven polyester material called Lutradur, made by Freudenberg Nonwovens. The product was free and artists using it could submit work to be selected for an exhibition, New Art/New Material (1989) at what is now the Gregg Museum of Art & Design at NC State University. While she didn’t enter the competition, she did send off for the material and began experimenting. Little did she know that this material would become what she would use exclusively from 1992 onwards.
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Pull of the Moon