Source: Michele Janette, 785-532-0772, mjanette@k-state.edu

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

K-STATE'S 19TH ANNUAL CULTURAL STUDIES SYMPOSIUM TO HOST ART SCHOLAR TERRY SMITH

MANHATTAN -- Kansas State University's 19th annual Cultural Studies Symposium will feature art and cultural scholar Terry Smith, who will discuss his recent work in the public lecture "Architecture After the Aftermath."

Smith's free lecture will be 4-5 p.m. Friday, April 9, at Pierce Commons in Seaton Hall. Hosts for Smith's lecture are the department of English, College of Architecture, Planning and Design, and K-State Libraries. Seating is limited, so advance arrival is recommended.

Smith is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the department of history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. His 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," published in 2006.

Smith's recent book "What is Contemporary Art?" from 2009 theorizes art in the context of influential art museums, and his book "Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America," published in 1993, won the inaugural Georgia O'Keefe Museum Prize in 2009 as the best book on American art in the last 25 years.

He also has been involved in various other projects, such as editing a number of 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 and co-founded a media action group in Australia that provided graphic art services to unions and dissident groups. The College Art Association recently gave Smith the Jewett Mather Award for art journalism, describing Smith as the 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.

For more information on Smith's presentation, contact Michelle Janette at 785-532-0772 or mjanette@k-state.edu.