Terry Smith (art historian)
Encyclopedia
Terry Smith is an Australia
n art historian, art critic
and artist who currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, New York
and Sydney
.
Since 2001 he has been Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh
. He also serves as a Board member of the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art
, Pittsburgh.
, where he won a General Exhibition in the 1962 Matriculation examinations. Between 1963 and 1967, he studied at the University of Melbourne
, where he studied art history under Professor Sir Joseph Burke, Franz Philipp and Bernard Smith
. When the Power Institute
was established at the University of Sydney
in 1968, he tutored to professors Bernard Smith, David Saunders and Donald Brook.
Winning a Harkness Fellowship in 1972, he studied at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York, under professors Goldwater, Rubin and Rosenblum, and at Columbia University
under Professor Meyer Schapiro
. While in New York, he joined the Art & Language
group of conceptual artists, including Joseph Kosuth, Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden and Michael Corris, and remained an active member 1972-1976.
Returning to Australia in 1975, he taught contemporary art and art historical method in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Melbourne and at the Art School, Preston Institute of Technology. His Master of Arts thesis on "American Abstract Expressionism: ethical attitudes and moral function" received the University Medal in 1976 from the University of Sydney
.
Appointed a lecturer at the Power Institute of Fine Arts in 1976, Smith remained until 2001, becoming Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture from 1994. During his tenure, the Institute became an international centre for the study of contemporary visual cultures. He was a founding Board Member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and remained on that Board until 2001.
When Ian Burn and Nigel Lendon returned to Australian in 1976, Smith joined with them to found Media Action Group, which soon was augmented by others, including Ian Milliss, and became Union Media Services (Sydney), an independent, artist-run organization that provided graphic art services to the union movement and dissident groups. Smith wrote art criticism for the Weekend Australian, Nation Review
, The Times on Sunday, as well a number of articles for local and international journals, now numbering over 100.
Smith's 1986 doctoral dissertation became Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993), winner of the inaugural Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Prize in 2009 for the best book on modern American art published in the past 25 years. The committee of jurors for the book prize they chose Smith's book because of its "excellence of writing and scholarship, its originality and its outstanding and multi-faceted exploration of the emergence and flourishing of modernism as a phenomenon in American art and culture."
Smith contributed three chapters to Bernard Smith's classic text Australian Painting 1788-1990 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991) and wrote lengthy studies of key works and themes in Australian art. These are collected in the two volumes Transformations in Australian Art, volume 1, The Nineteenth Century: Landscape, Colony and Nation, volume 2, The Twentieth Century: Modernism and Aboriginality (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002; joint winner of the Power Institute/Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize, 2003).
He also edited many other books, including In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity (Power Publications and the University of Chicago Press, 1997), First People, Second Chance: The Humanities and Aboriginal Australia (Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1999), Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era (Power Publications and the University of Chicago Press, 2001), with Paul Patton, Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars (Power Publications, 2001; Japanese edition, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005), and Contemporary Art + Philanthropy (University of NSW Press, 2007).
In 1996 Smith was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
and a Membre titulaire, Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art, serving as the Australian representative and Vice-President of the latter 1999-2003. He has been a visiting professor at the Universities of California, San Diego
, Chicago
, Duke University
, Pennsylvania
, Queensland
, and is currently a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. Smith has also been awarded a number of prestigious research fellowships including, in recent years, being named a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 2001-2; Fondation de France Chercheur Invité at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris, 2007; and GlaxoSmithKlein Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, Raleigh-Durham, NC.
Smith's current work explores the relationships between contemporary art and its wider settings, within a world picture that he believes is characterized above all by its contemporaneity. His findings are being presented in a series of books. These include The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006); Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity (edited with Nancy Condee and Okwui Enwezor, and published by Duke University Press, 2008); and What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He is working on Contemporary Art of the World: Late Modern to Now (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011).
as the 2010 winner of the Frank Jewett Mather
Award for distinction in art criticism. The announcement reads:
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n art historian, art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
and artist who currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
and Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
.
Since 2001 he has been Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh
University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh, commonly referred to as Pitt, is a state-related research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded as Pittsburgh Academy in 1787 on what was then the American frontier, Pitt is one of the oldest continuously chartered institutions of...
. He also serves as a Board member of the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art
Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art
The Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce, Slovakia was established in 1991 by the American family of the artist Andy Warhol and the Slovak Ministry of Culture...
, Pittsburgh.
Career
Smith was a student at Melbourne High SchoolMelbourne High School
Melbourne High School is a selective entry state school for boys in years 9 to 12 located in the Melbourne suburb of South Yarra. Being a selective school, it is known mainly for its strong academic reputation...
, where he won a General Exhibition in the 1962 Matriculation examinations. Between 1963 and 1967, he studied at the University of Melbourne
University of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne is a public university located in Melbourne, Victoria. Founded in 1853, it is the second oldest university in Australia and the oldest in Victoria...
, where he studied art history under Professor Sir Joseph Burke, Franz Philipp and Bernard Smith
Bernard William Smith
Bernard William Smith was an Australian art historian, art critic and academic.-Biography:Smith was born in Balmain, Sydney to Charles Smith and Rose Anne Tierney on 3 October 1916. In 1941, he married his first wife, Kate Challis, who died in 1989. Smith married his second wife, Margaret Forster,...
. When the Power Institute
Power Institute of Fine Arts
The Power Institute of Fine Arts is a teaching and research department, encompassing the fields of art history and theory, within the University of Sydney. Founded in 1968, the institute was established out of a bequest from the expatriate Australian abstract artist John Wardell Power...
was established at the University of Sydney
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...
in 1968, he tutored to professors Bernard Smith, David Saunders and Donald Brook.
Winning a Harkness Fellowship in 1972, he studied at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York, under professors Goldwater, Rubin and Rosenblum, and at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
under Professor Meyer Schapiro
Meyer Schapiro
Meyer Schapiro was a Lithuanian-born American art historian known for forging new art historical methodologies that incorporated an interdisciplinary approach to the study of works of art...
. While in New York, he joined the Art & Language
Art & Language
Art & Language is a shifting collaboration among conceptual artists that has undergone many changes since its inception in the late 1960s. Their early work, as well as their journal Art-Language, first published in 1969, is regarded as an important influence on much conceptual art both in the...
group of conceptual artists, including Joseph Kosuth, Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden and Michael Corris, and remained an active member 1972-1976.
Returning to Australia in 1975, he taught contemporary art and art historical method in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Melbourne and at the Art School, Preston Institute of Technology. His Master of Arts thesis on "American Abstract Expressionism: ethical attitudes and moral function" received the University Medal in 1976 from the University of Sydney
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...
.
Appointed a lecturer at the Power Institute of Fine Arts in 1976, Smith remained until 2001, becoming Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture from 1994. During his tenure, the Institute became an international centre for the study of contemporary visual cultures. He was a founding Board Member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and remained on that Board until 2001.
When Ian Burn and Nigel Lendon returned to Australian in 1976, Smith joined with them to found Media Action Group, which soon was augmented by others, including Ian Milliss, and became Union Media Services (Sydney), an independent, artist-run organization that provided graphic art services to the union movement and dissident groups. Smith wrote art criticism for the Weekend Australian, Nation Review
Nation Review
Nation Reviewwas an Australian Sunday newspaper, which ceased publication in 1981. It was launched in 1970 after independent publisher Gordon Barton bought out Tom Fitzgerald's Nation publication and merged it with his own Sunday Review journal...
, The Times on Sunday, as well a number of articles for local and international journals, now numbering over 100.
Smith's 1986 doctoral dissertation became Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993), winner of the inaugural Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Prize in 2009 for the best book on modern American art published in the past 25 years. The committee of jurors for the book prize they chose Smith's book because of its "excellence of writing and scholarship, its originality and its outstanding and multi-faceted exploration of the emergence and flourishing of modernism as a phenomenon in American art and culture."
Smith contributed three chapters to Bernard Smith's classic text Australian Painting 1788-1990 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991) and wrote lengthy studies of key works and themes in Australian art. These are collected in the two volumes Transformations in Australian Art, volume 1, The Nineteenth Century: Landscape, Colony and Nation, volume 2, The Twentieth Century: Modernism and Aboriginality (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002; joint winner of the Power Institute/Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize, 2003).
He also edited many other books, including In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity (Power Publications and the University of Chicago Press, 1997), First People, Second Chance: The Humanities and Aboriginal Australia (Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1999), Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era (Power Publications and the University of Chicago Press, 2001), with Paul Patton, Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars (Power Publications, 2001; Japanese edition, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005), and Contemporary Art + Philanthropy (University of NSW Press, 2007).
In 1996 Smith was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
Australian Academy of the Humanities
The Australian Academy of the Humanities was established by Royal Charter in 1969 to advance scholarship and public interest in the humanities in Australia...
and a Membre titulaire, Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art, serving as the Australian representative and Vice-President of the latter 1999-2003. He has been a visiting professor at the Universities of California, San Diego
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...
, Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
, Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
, Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
, Queensland
University of Queensland
The University of Queensland, also known as UQ, is a public university located in state of Queensland, Australia. Founded in 1909, it is the oldest and largest university in Queensland and the fifth oldest in the nation...
, and is currently a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. Smith has also been awarded a number of prestigious research fellowships including, in recent years, being named a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 2001-2; Fondation de France Chercheur Invité at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris, 2007; and GlaxoSmithKlein Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, Raleigh-Durham, NC.
Smith's current work explores the relationships between contemporary art and its wider settings, within a world picture that he believes is characterized above all by its contemporaneity. His findings are being presented in a series of books. These include The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006); Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity (edited with Nancy Condee and Okwui Enwezor, and published by Duke University Press, 2008); and What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He is working on Contemporary Art of the World: Late Modern to Now (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011).
Awards
Smith was named by the College Art AssociationCollege Art Association
The College Art Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for practitioners and scholars of art, art history, and art criticism...
as the 2010 winner of the Frank Jewett Mather
Frank Jewett Mather
Frank Jewett Mather was an American art critic and professor.He was born at Deep River, Conn., and graduated from Williams College in 1889 and from Johns Hopkins in 1892: he studied also at Berlin and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris...
Award for distinction in art criticism. The announcement reads:
Terry Smith is that rare art and social historian able to write criticism at once alert to the forces that contextualize art and sensitive to the elements and qualities that inhere to the works of art themselves. His most recent book, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), contains a series of interrelated essays that unpack a vast range of topics and issues and take the reader on a theoretical tour through some of the world's most influential art museums, laying bare their conflicted missions and studying the heightening distinction, and dispute, between modern and contemporary art.
Publications
- Terry Smith, "The Provincialism Problem"Cultural cringeCultural cringe, in cultural studies and social anthropology, is an internalized inferiority complex which causes people in a country to dismiss their own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries...
, ArtforumArtforumArtforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
, Sept. 1974, pp. 54–9. - Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009
- Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee editors, Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008
- Terry Smith, editor, Contemporary Art + Philanthropy, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press for the Sherman Foundation, 2007
- Terry Smith, The Architecture of Aftermath, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006
- Terry Smith, Transformations in Australian Art, vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century: Landscape, Colony and Nation; vol. 2. The Twentieth Century: Modernism and Aboriginality, Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002
- Terry Smith Editor, Paul Patton editors,Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars Sydney: Power Publications, 2001; Japanese edition, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005
- Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? Contemporary Art, Contemporaneity and Art to Come, Sydney, Artspace Critical Issues Series, 2001
- Terry Smith, editor, Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era, Sydney, Power Publications, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001
- Terry Smith, editor,First People, Second Chance; The Humanities and Aboriginal Australia, Canberra, Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1999
- Terry Smith, editor, with Jennifer Allison, Katherine Gregouras, George Symons,From Vision to Sesquicentenary, The University of Sydney through its Art Collection, Sydney, Standing Committee of Convocation of the University of Sydney, 1999
- Terry Smith, editor, In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity, Sydney, Power Publications, 1997, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998
- Terry Smith, editor, Ideas of the University, Sydney: Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and Power Publications, 1996
- Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993
- Terry Smith, editor, Constructing Australian Art: Eight Critiques, Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts Occasional Paper No 2, May 1986
- Terry Smith and Anthony Bradley editors, Australian Art and Architecture: Essays Presented to Bernard Smith, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1980)
- Terry Smith, editor, Art & Language: Australia 1975, Art & Language Press, Banbury, New York, Sydney 1976
- Terry Smith, Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden, Draft for an Anti-Textbook, special issue, Art-Language, Vol.3, No 1 (Sept 1974)
- Terry Smith, Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden, et al., Handbook (Art & Language Press, New York, and the Mezzanine, Nova Scotia College of Art, Halifax, N.S. 1973