Terry Smith has been appointed Slade Professor of Fine Arts, University of Cambridge, 2025-2026.
During Lent Term, January 27 to March 19, 2026, he will present a lecture series entitled
IMAGE AS IDEA: SEEING, SHOWING, THINKING IN THE HISTORY OF ART
The Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge was founded in 1869 as the result of a bequest from the art collector Felix Slade (1788-1868). At the same time, similar chairs were founded in the Universities of Oxford and London. Holders of the Chair usually deliver eight public lectures and four classes for students in the department of the History of Art during either the Michaelmas or the Lent Term of their year in office. The Slade Professorship of Fine Art has been held by many of the most distinguished historians of art and architecture from around the world, among them James Ackerman, Anthony Blunt, Anita Brookner, Roger Fry, Ernst Gombrich, Nicholaus Pevsner, Griselda Pollock, Virginia Spate, and Rudolf Wittkower.
During Lent Term 2026 (January 27 to March 19), Professor Smith will deliver eight lectures in a series entitled ‘Image as Idea: Seeing, Showing, Thinking in the History of Art’. Each lecture will depart from a close reading of one work of art or one iconic image to explore a major aspect of human world picturing. The historical trajectory will range from Indigenous Dreaming imagery (including that of Australian Aboriginal artists Yirawalla, Narritjin Maymuru, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula and Emily Kam Kngwarreye) and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, through Piero della Francesca’s portrait of Saint Augustine and key works by Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, and Willem de Kooning, to installations, actions and projects by several contemporary artists and art collectives, locating them within current image economies, or iconomies.
Following Professor Smith, subsequent Slade Professors will be Professor Eyal Weizman, Goldsmith, University of London, 2026-27; Professor Tamar Garb, University College, London, 2027-28; Professor Stephen Campbell, Johns Hopkins University, 2028-29; and Dr Nichols Cullinan, director, The British Museum, 2029-30.
TERRY SMITH is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney, and Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He is Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School, Professor at Large in The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, Sharjah, and Faculty at Large, Curatorial Studies Program, School of Visual Arts, New York. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2010 he was named the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate and won the Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA). In 2022, CAA conferred on him its Distinguished Teacher of Art History Award. He is author of Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Transformations in Australian Art (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002); The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006), What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011), Thinking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, New York, 2012), Talking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, 2015), The Contemporary Composition (Sternberg Press, 2016), One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism (Duke University Press, 2107), Art to come: Histories of Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2019), Curating the Complex & The Open Strike (Sternberg and MIT Press, 2021), Iconomy: Towards a Political Economy of Images (Anthem Press, 2022), and, with Fred R. Myers, Six Paintings from Papunya: A Conversation (Duke University Press, 2024). He is currently editing the Selected Writings of Okwui Enwezor. A founding Board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, he served on the board of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and is Board Member Emeritus of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. See www.terryesmith.net/web/about.
You must be logged in to post a comment.