Another story of Alumni success, Dan Smith, Lamar Dodd School of Art BFA and MAEd Alum, was recently appointed as Curriculum Coordinator for Fine Arts, Health, and PE for Clarke County School District.

Smith was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1974. He received both a BFA in Painting (1997) and a MAEd in Art Education (2002) from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. Smith is currently a PhD student in Art Education at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. After working for 13 years in Clarke County Schools, he was appointed to the position of Curriculum Coordinator Fine Arts Health, and Physical Education for Clarke County School District in 2018. 

Smith’s position is a supervisory role that oversees K-12 Art, Music, Theater, Dance, Health and Physical Education educators and curriculum. He sees his role as instrumental to strengthening community connections to the arts in Athens. He oversees around 80 teachers on a daily basis.

This new role has pushed him to learn more about Music, Health, and PE but he feels like it was the perfect time for him to challenge himself. Even though he’s worn many different hats since graduating with a BFA, “one constant in everything [he’s] done since graduating has been to make art”.

As a proponent of the value of community involvement in the art, Smith is still an active artist. His work involves research that helps him contextualize his role as a maker and art educator. This pursuit draws on imagery and themes from Moby Dick. While his PHD studies and full-time career fill his schedule, he sees his studio practice as non-negotiable.

He works mostly in paint and is specifically drawn to spray paint for its immediacy and clean color. His home is complete with a basement and workshop that is his “dream studio”. After graduation he moved to Hilton Head, SC to teach at the local high school. His practice at the time, which featured large 10-foot expressionistic paintings, soon became collaged drawings and small works featuring childhood doodles in order to accommodate to the limited space in his apartment. This transition was this beginning of “spontaneous monsterfication” which is a large part of Smith’s work now. He shifts into automatic drawing state and creates an amalgamation of color, shapes, and childhood memories.

Smith encourages students to make art for themselves first and to “just keep making”.  He states that having a career in the Arts allows him to sustain himself and be able to “make art for the sake of art,” by have complete creative control with only himself to please.

“Being an artist is a lot like being Batman. You get to come to work and be Bruce Wayne and then go out and be the artist.”

Smith is navigating the fine line between being a creative professional and being an artist. This space is something he is studying in his PhD work at the Lamar Dodd School of Art.

A Doctor of Philosophy in Art degree with an emphasis in Art Education is the highest degree offered by the area of Art Education. The Art Education program at the Lamar Dodd School of Art is grounded in critical, experiential, and interdisciplinary inquiry. As a community of art educators, they explore the intersections of contemporary art, histories of art education, visual culture, service-learning, social justice, and digital technology. Graduates are encouraged to be innovators who challenge the status quo through locally and globally transformative practices.

Smith's website: http://seedanpaint.com/