Remembering Dee Smart

“A rare find - kind, brilliant, honest and full of love. Her passion for the arts, her family and her friends knew no bounds. From my first day of knowing Dee… nearly 25 years ago, she became a constant, thoughtful and truly dear friend.” 

The RWA is saddened to hear of the passing of Dee Smart, RWA (hon) and former member of our Senior leadership team. To mark her life,  RWA Academician Paul Gough shares a few words im memory of her.

Many of us will have met and worked with Dee during her years at the RWA. She stepped in to the role of Executive Administrator during a particularly demanding time at the Academy and met every challenge with her habitual warmth, fastidious attention to detail, and indomitable sense of joy.

I worked with Dee when I was Dean at the UWE’s Faculty of Art, Media and Design in Bower Ashton, where she was one of my senior administrators, effortlessly efficient and unflappable, ready to take on any task and deliver the best outcome for the university. As part of our collaboration with the Academy, I had no doubt she could fill the vacant position of Executive Administrator and for nearly seven years (2003-2010) she performed the complicated and hugely demanding role of running the institution with energy and aplomb.

It helped that Dee came from an artistic background; her father Dobrivoje Beljkasic, was an eminent artist Sarajevo, whose work is in national collections – as well as the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. During the tumultuous civil war Dee, pretty much singlehandedly travelled to Bosnia and rescued her mother and father from the war-ravaged city, and settled them in the UK, first with a generous host family in Wiltshire, then close to her and husband Simon, in Bristol.

Deeply committed to enriching the artistic memory of her father, Dee promoted his work in major collections, produced catalogues of his oeuvre and helped devise a TV documentary, Leaving Sarajevo, transmitted on ITV in 1997. A fine portrait of her father was painted by Glo Williams RWA and his work featured in the touring exhibition  'Refuge and Renewal' that came to the RWA in 2019/20.After seven successful years at the RWA, Dee and I worked together at UWE when she became head of public engagement at Frenchay; then from 2017 she was Deputy and later Head of Public Engagement for Research at the University of Bristol.

Those artists, council members, staff and external stakeholders who worked with Dee, recall her with very high regard, steering the academy through exciting and eventful times. She was, wrote one, a source of kindness, wisdom, and light, but what many will remember most is her warmth and the way she made everyone feel valued.

To lightly paraphrase two tributes: ‘The world has lost an extraordinary force for good - the incomparable Dee Smart. Without her inspired and dedicated leadership, the RWA would probably not have survived into the 2010s, and everything thereafter has been built on her legacy.’

We will never forget the person she was — “her kindness, her love of life and of people, her optimism and positive spirit. She was one of those rare people whose warmth leaves a lasting mark on everyone she met.”

Thank you, Dee.