Presented in partnership with Krannert Art Museum.

Blair Ebony Smith (lovenloops) is a practicing multimodal artist-scholar and lover from southside Richmond, Virginia. As a sample-based 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, collectivity, everlasting love and sound/listening. She uses her lived experience and DJ/beat-making practice to take on Black (girlhood) study, sound, time, listening and more.  Smith is the author of solo, co-written, 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. With Ruth Nicole Brown, Blair co-edited a special issue of Visual Arts Research on Black girlhood, play and aesthetics. She teaches classes focused on Black femme, queer and feminist art, music, sound, pedagogy, play, and listening. 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. She released her first project, Don’t Ever Forget It with independent label Soulvember Records (2016) based in Los Angeles, CA. Blair is currently an Assistant Professor of Art Education and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.