faculty focus Sharing a Passion for the History of Art
Professor of Art History Katherine Smith standing in front of her exhibition in Agnes Scott College’s 2012 thinking|showing exhibit. Photo by Tom Meyer.
Katherine Smith describes her journey to the front of the classroom as “serendipitous.” While in Tuscany crafting a metalwork portfolio and considering MFA applications, she picked up a teaching assistant position for a survey of Italian Renaissance art. A weekly field trip changed everything: Smith realized that the layout of the Siena Cathedral was essential to understanding the removed art commissioned for its interior. Back in the classroom, she got creative. Smith projected images of paintings of the life of the Virgin Mary onto temporary walls to show her students the importance of architectural context to the works. “I was hooked,” Smith recalls. Though she had experience with museum and curatorial work, it was clear to Smith at that moment that she wanted to teach. Smith came to Agnes Scott College in 2003 and has been an essential member of the college’s Department of Art and Art History ever since. In addition to an upper-level seminar class and more, Smith is teaching a new kind of introduction to art history in the spring 2022 semester. While traditional art history surveys race against the semester to cover every famous work of art, Smith’s introductory course is different. She explains she “relinquished the historical chronology” and replaced it with a focus on building the skill of visual analysis. One exercise she gives her students to illustrate this idea is “close looking,” where students observe an image or object for 30 uninterrupted minutes. “My study of art history always starts with the image,” Smith says. “I believe strongly in slowing down perception, paying attention and trusting your own ability to discover things if you are willing to spend time and have patience.” 16
Professor of Art History Katherine Smith
Smith applies this philosophy to her own work. In spring 2021, she published her first book, “The Accidental Possibilities of the City: Claes Oldenburg’s Urbanism in Postwar America.” Smith’s scholarship examines “the intersection of art history and architectural history,” and her book is no different. In “Accidental Possibilities”, Smith interrogates Claes Oldenburg’s sculptures in the context of the city, interpreting his art as urban theory. Smith is excited about the possibilities of teaching with her book post-publication. Not only does it apply to her seminar class, but she has also assigned part of it to writing and digital communication graduate students as an example of academic writing. “It was such a gift for me for [the students] to give perspectives on writing that I had lived with for two decades and just barely turned out to the world,” she explains. “Now that I’m teaching the book, I can kind of let it go.” From her first days of teaching about the Siena Cathedral, Smith shares with her students curiosity about reconnecting art with its contexts. In her seminar class titled Contemporary Art, Architectural Form, Urban Space, Smith brings this curiosity and her dual focus on art and architecture to Atlanta. The class applies aspects of Smith’s book—analyses of the ways that artists use urban landscapes—to local art. She says that the class is still a work in progress; Smith wants the students to have a say in what they study. She reports that, so far, the students are interested in sociopolitical aspects of the art. “Some of the questions that [the students] are asking, I haven’t asked in the same way before,” she says. “We’re going to discover new things together.”
