Image: Cauleen Smith, Remote Viewing, 2011, still from digital film (copyright Cauleen Smith)

Cauleen Smith’s Remote Viewing

Cherise Smith (University of Texas at Austin)

Cherise Smith is the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in African American Studies in the Department African & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin where she is affiliated with Art History. Her research centers on African American art, the history of photography, performance, and contemporary art. She is the author of Michael Ray Charles: Studies in Blackness (University of Texas Press, 2020), which won the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Duke University Press, 2011). She has published essays in Art Journal, American Art, and exposure among other venues. She also serves on the editorial boards of American Art and Art Journal and is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Archives of American Art Journal. Her research has been supported by the Getty Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research at Harvard University. She is Founding Executive Director of Art Galleries at Black Studies and has worked in the curatorial departments of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Saint Louis Art Museum among other institutions.

Art in the Longue Durée: This year’s lecture series will feature scholars who take a longue durée approach to investigating cities, sites, and artifacts. Many of the sites and artworks we study today have been produced through on-going processes of transformation, interpretation, and memorialization. Such works raise questions about the relationship between the past and present, even as they invite us to consider the role of memory, war, theories of preservation, and politics in the creation of historic cities, monuments, museum objects, and ruins. Taking a longue durée (or biographical) approach productively shifts the focus of scholarly investigation from moments of origin to on-going processes of creation, calling on us to consider the layered histories that develop over time.

Click here to download the flyer .

Save the date for the last talk of the lecture series on Thursday, May 18 by Claudia Zapata (UCLA), Topic TBA (unless specified, lectures take place at 4:30 PM in Arts 1332).