Blair Ebony Smith

Blair Ebony Smith, PhD

Blair Ebony Smith also known as lovenloops is a practicing multimodal artist-scholar and lover from southside Richmond, Virginia. As a 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, coalition, everlasting love, and sound/listening. She uses her lived experience and DJ/beat-making practice to take on Black (girlhood) study.  Smith is the author of solo, co-written, and 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. She teaches classes focused on Black girl, femme, queer and feminist art, sound, pedagogy, play, and listening.

She is currently at work on a multi-modal book project, part vinyl LP, tentatively titled Love and Loops: Memory, Time, Sound & Black Girlhood. 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. Since 2014, She has composed sample-based sound art, beats, and loops under her alter ego, lovenloops released tracks on SoundCloud and Bandcamp, making music with lovers, friends, and homegirls.  She released her first project, Don’t Ever Forget It with 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. Now, she is dreaming, teaching, studying, remembering and making wholeheartedly what might open us to listening and moving towards love, slowly and generously.