In 2013, Elizabeth Smith was named executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York City, an artist-endowed foundation established by the renowned painter, sculptor and printmaker during her lifetime. The foundation aims to preserve Frankenthaler's legacy by publishing a catalogue raisonné, organizing and encouraging significant exhibitions of her work, and making grants in other areas of the visual arts. Before assuming this post, Smith was executive director of curatorial affairs at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto since 2010. There she expanded the gallery's international reach, helping to commandeer such high-profile exhibitions as Abstract Expressionist New York from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her other previous positions include chief curator and deputy director for programs at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, and curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Smith has taught at the University of Southern California and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a 2012 Fellow of the New York-based Center for Curatorial Leadership. In 2012 she served as a Center exhibitions panelist, and she contributed to the Center's 2013 publication Pigeons on the Grass, Alas: Contemporary Curators Talk About the Field.
