Kara Smith is an educator and artist working and living in the Berkshires. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Art Education from Brooklyn College, and a New York State Teaching Certification from the same college. She’s also a holder of a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University where she majored in Painting. She has several years of experience as an arts educator in Brooklyn. Kara has also been a freelance art director and prop stylist, a dresser at the Metropolitan Opera, and an arts administrator at many galleries in Boston, New York and Los Angeles. Her works investigate the significance of moments that are ordinarily overlooked. She pulls from memories, dreams, archetypal symbols and myths, and personal anecdotes, to compose worlds, whether imagined or real, that brings forth ghostly memory. This dim sense of familiarity fascinates her, and highlights the significant nature of social memory and the way the social memory affects ways our culture perceives its history.
Currently, Kara works for a non-profit art organization called Community Access to the Arts. It is an organization that provides performing and visual arts workshop to people with disabilities. She’s curious about the peculiar and mischievous ways people co-exist and connect together and the people’s collective search for belonging. She’s exhibited at Hudson Opera House, Hudson, NEW YORK, Eggers Studio Collective, Gallery 35, Great Barrington, MA, Gallery 22, Peekskill, New York, Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, S Artspace, NEW YORK, The Road Gallery, New York, 3-art Collective, Brooklyn, New York, among others.
