Faculty
Terry Smith
(PhD, University of Sydney and Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory
Room 104, Frick Fine Arts Building
Phone: 412-648-2404
E-mail: tes2@pitt.edu
Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA, is 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. From 1994–2001 he was Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney. He was a member of the Art & Language group (New York) and a founder of Union Media Services (Sydney). A foundation board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, he is currently a board member of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. In 1996 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Membré Titulaire of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art.
His major research interests are world contemporary art, including its institutional and social contexts; the histories of multiple modernities and modernisms; the history and theory of contemporaneity; and the historiography of art history and art criticism. He has special expertise in international contemporary art (practice, theory, institutions, markets), American visual cultures since 1870, and Australia art since settlement, including Aboriginal art. Current graduate students under his supervision are working on topics such as critical global practices, alternative avant-gardes, cultural policy, and art writing. He teaches the open course Introduction to Contemporary Art, and a graduate seminar on modernity and contemporaneity.
Selected publications:
Transformations, vol. 1, Nineteenth Century Australian Art: Landscape, Colony and Nation; vol. 2. Twentieth Century Australian Art: Modernism and Aboriginality, Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002
Editor, with Paul Patton, Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars, Sydney: Power Publications, 2001 (Japanese edition: Tokyo, Midori, 2006)
What Is Contemporary Art? Contemporary Art, Contemporaneity and Art to Come, Sydney, Artspace Critical Issues Series, 2001 (pamphlet)
Editor, Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era, Sydney, Power Publications, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001 (Introduction; essays by Marshall Berman, Tom Gunning, Peter Hutchings, Jean Baudrillard, Hugh Silverman, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Elizabeth Grosz, Javier Sanjines, Fred R. Myers, and Anthony Vidler)
Editor, First People, Second Chance: The Humanities and Aboriginal Australia, Canberra, Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1999 (Introduction; essays by Marcia Langton, Henry Reynolds, Paul Patton, Margaret Clunies Ross, and Ian McLean)
Editor (with Jennifer Allison, Katherine Gregouras, and 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 (Introduction; essays by various authors)
Editor, In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity, Sydney, Power Publications, 1997, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998 (Introduction; essays by T.J. Clark, Tamar Garb, Roger Benjamin, Virginia Spate, Richard Shiff, Bernard Smith, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Mary Kelly)
Editor, Ideas of the University, Sydney: Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and Power Publications, 1996 (Introduction, essay by Samuel Weber, discussion)
Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993
Honors/Awards:
Grants for the Symposium “Modernity & Contemporaneity: Antinomies of Art and Culture after the C20th”: The Pittsburgh Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh
Art Association of Australia and New Zealand/Power Institute Prize for Best Book on Art 2003 for Transformations in Australian Art, volumes 1 and 2 (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002), joint award
Getty Scholar, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
Australian Research Council Strategic Partnership with Industry Research &Training Support Grant, “The Big Picture: A Planning Matrix for the Visual Arts,” with the National Association of the Visual Arts, the Department of Art History and Theory and the Department of Computer Studies, University of Sydney
Australian Postgraduate Award (Industry), Australian Research Council Strategic Partnership with Industry Research & Training Support Grant, “Useful Law for a Changing Industry,” with Industry Partner, Simpson’s Solicitors
Australian Research Council Strategic Partnership with Industry Research & Training Support Grant, “The Visual Arts in Australia: Professional, Industrial and Legal Issues,” team leader, with the National Association of the Visual Arts, the Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales as industry partners.
Current projects:
The Architecture of Aftermath, forthcoming, University of Chicago Press (Spring 2006)
(with Nancy Condee and Okwui Enwezor) Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity, edited papers from the 2004 Pittsburgh Symposium
World Contemporary Art, for Laurence King Publishers (UK)
“Critical Languages for New Media Arts: Digital Arts Edition,” a five year conference, exhibition and publication program under grants from the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Zentrum für Media und Kunst, Karlsruhe, and iCinema Centre, University of New South Wales
What Is Contemporary Art? a study of three approaches to the question posed by the title
The Mass Production Imaginary (a study of the visual imaginations of the engineers Frederick Taylor and George Richardson), for Smithsonian Institution Press
Art History G6001y: Style in art and science, Notes from a Theory and Methods course given by Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University, New York, in 1973 (transcripts with brief introduction)
Looking through Degas (a study of works by Degas in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles).