CURATORS WE LOVE
PHOTO: ELAN VARSHAY
Laura Finlay Smith Laura Finlay Smith is the curator and administrator of the Tia Collection, “A global art collection that is a testimony to the value of diverse cultures, histories, and aesthetics” and is based in Santa Fe. In 1988, fresh from completing her bachelor’s degree at Denison University, a liberal arts school in Granville, Ohio, Smith’s first job, at the Gerald Peters Gallery, was filing transparencies. Two decades later, while working at the Nedra Matteucci Gallery, she met the anonymous collector behind the TIA Collection. Since 2012, Smith has used her formidable intelligence, energy, and integrity to further the Tia collector’s intent to share his love for art, which embraces multiple styles, and spans continents and more than a century. She works to build alliances with artists, galleries, museums, scholars, and collectors through their acquisitions, and by lending art, organizing traveling exhibitions, publishing catalogs, and commissioning art works.
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JANUARY 2022
Following is a brief exchange between curator Laura Finlay Smith and author MaLin Wilson-Powell, who collaborated on the traveling exhibition and catalog New Beginnings: An American Story of Romantics and Modernists in the West. MaLin Wilson-Powell: Please talk about your priorities as the Tia Collection’s curator and administrator. Laura Finlay Smith: They are always changing, but since 2012, the priorities have been two-pronged and based on balancing which artists to collect with what the collection will be doing in the long term. I’m constantly reading, doing research, listening to podcasts—learning about artists. And, of course, all artists have other artists they admire, and I always pay attention to that. Also, balancing the historic interests of the collection with the contemporary. MWP: You seem cognizant of but not swayed by trends, always finding strong artworks by underrecognized or overlooked artists. LFS: I think this comes from being a dealer. There were so many talented artists we represented at
