AIA Kansas City: The American Institute of Architects

A prominent scholar-lecturer in cultural studies will visit Kansas State University and the College of Architecture, Planning and Design. Terry Smith, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art at the University of Pittsburgh, will present on Friday, April 9, at 4p in the Pierce Commons of Seaton Hall. The presentation is open to the public without charge.

Terry Smith’s extensive work and recent series of books treat the wider cultural contexts of art and architecture, including an important work on architecture after 9/11, The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006). His recent What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009) theorizes art in the context of infl uential art museums, and his Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993) won the inaugural Georgia O’Keefe Museum Prize in 2009 for the best book on American art in the last 25 years. He has edited a number of other collections on topics ranging from the Aboriginal art of his native Australia, to masculinity, deconstruction and modernism.

He has been a board member on important museums from Sydney to Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum and co-founded a Media Action Group in Australia that provided graphic art services to unions and dissident groups. This year, the College Art Association gave Smith the distinction of the Jewett Mather Award for art journalism, an award that has been given to such luminaries as Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss, Leo Steinberg and Arthur C. Danto. The award described Terry Smith as “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.”

While visiting K-State, Smith will also be conducting a seminar on Walter Benjamin. His visit is being sponsored by the Department of English, Hale Library, the Offi ce of the President and the College of Architecture, Planning and Design from the K-State Student Fine Arts Fee.