Overview

Join us on Thursday 14 July for the Sydney launch of art historian Terry Smith's newest publication, Talking Contemporary Curating, the second publication in the series Perpectives in Curating. Smith will be joined in conversation by Dr. Lizzie Muller, UNSW Art & Design.

Talking Contemporary Curating is a compilation of conversations between art historian Terry Smith and 12 leading international curators, art historians, and theorists deeply immersed in reflecting upon the demands of their respective practices; the contexts of exhibition making; and the platforms through which art may be made public. The contributors include Zdenka Badovinac, Claire Bishop, Zoe Butt, Germano Celant, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Okwui Enwezor, Boris Groys, Jens Hoffmann, Mami Kataoka, Maria Lind, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Mari Carmen Ramírez. Read together, they present a fascinating picture of how curating can contribute to a broader understanding of our contemporary world.

About the author

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 2011 to 2014 he was also Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. He was the 2010 winner of the Franklin Jewett Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA), and in 2011 received the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate Award. In 2014 he was a Clark fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2007-8 the GlaxoSmithKlein Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Research Centre, Raleigh-Durham, and in 2001-2002 he was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. From 1994 to 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). During the 1970s he was art critic at these Australian newspapers:Weekend Australian, Nation Review, Times on Sunday; he continues to write for art journals and magazines throughout the world. A foundation Board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and from 2004 to 2014 Board member of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, he is currently a member of the Board of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Smith is the author of a number of books, notably Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993; winner of the inaugural Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Prize 2009); 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 Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize, 2003); The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006), What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009),  Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Laurence King; Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011 and 2012), Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), Sodobna Umetnost in Sodobnos: Zbirka Esjeci [Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity: Collected Essays] (Ljubljana: SDLK, Slovensko drustvo likovnih kritikov [Slovenian Society of Critical Aesthetics], 2013), Savremena umetnost I savremenost: zbirka eseja [Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity: Collected Essays](Orion Publishers: Belgrade, 2014), and Talking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2015).