I work with needlepoint and other textile processes to expose the diversity of attitudes toward labor and the complex relationship between art history and domestic craft. Using established methods of Conceptual art – rule based making, appropriation, exquisite corpse – the work addresses unconscious biases we hold, both as makers and non-makers, about the way we value our time and the time of “experts” versus the time of “hobbyists”.
BIOGRAPHY
Mary Smull is an artist and educator living in Philadelphia, PA. Recently, her work has been exhibited nationally at Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia and Daimler Financial Corporate Headquarters in Farmington Hills, Michigan, and internationally at Korea National University of the Arts in Seoul, South Korea and Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She received her her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 2009, where she was nominated for the Cranbrook Museum of Art Purchase Prize and the Daimler Emerging Artist Award. Recently, Smull received a University of the Arts Faculty Enrichment Award to study computer-aided woven design at the Jacquard Center in Hendersonville, North Carolina. She is a member of the Philadelphia cooperative gallery Grizzly Grizzly.
Smull teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD and University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, and has taught and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
