Faculty Focus

Sharing a Passion for the History of Art

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.”

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.”

Katherine Smith, professor of art history

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.”

Sharpening Our Sight

Learning to see is not easy. Doing it well means searching past one’s personal experience to see that of others. It requires putting assumptions aside to understand how something so beneficial can have such devastating impacts on others.

For Viniece Jennings, an assistant professor of public health at Agnes Scott College, seeing is only the critical first step.

“A big part of being a thought leader is that willingness to see different aspects of systems, not only to see them but also to reflect, analyze and act,” says Jennings. “Those three skills are important for people to not only develop as scholars but as people.”

It is these skills that Jennings strives to pass along to her students, whether through their participation in Agnes Scott’s annual Women’s Global Leadership Conference or her courses in environmental health and communications.

“A lot of my work has been energized by helping bridge the conversation taking place among the health, social sciences and environmental fields, the ones that

get lost in translation when we communicate to the public,” she says.

Jennings awoke to this intersection when she was in high school in Decatur, Georgia.

Assistant Professor of Public Health Viniece Jennings

“It was seeing environmental injustice in my community that really sparked the connection among the environment, social justice and health,” she explains.

Having classmates with health issues that some speculated were linked to environmental exposures onvinced Jennings. After realizing she could study this as a career, she pursued environmental science at Delaware State University and earned her Ph.D. from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. Later interning at the White House Council on Environmental Quality under the Obama administration, she saw how issues such as water quality, transportation, commerce and health affected people in their communities. Her years of innovative work also led to her selection as an environmental health fellow at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University.

“Sometimes we don’t think about these different connections until there’s a catastrophic situation, but the connections are there,” says Jennings, who joined the Agnes Scott faculty in 2020.

Jennings is bringing more attention to how disparate access to green spaces relates to different aspects of health and quality of life. She recently served as the lead author on a commentary on green spaces and air pollution injustice that was published in the premier journal Nature Communications. On one hand, green spaces can positively affect people’s health, beautify landscapes and make neighborhoods more desirable. However, enhanced neighborhoods can increase property values and challenge affordable housing. Such considerations also led to an article she coauthored on green gentrification and public health.

“When the character of a community changes,” she says, “they may have an increased level of stress because they don’t know if they can stay in this community for much longer. The social connections they’ve developed over the years can falter. So the community is being improved, but ‘Is it being improved with me in mind?’”

This fall, the U.S. Global Change Research Program selected Jennings as coauthor of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a report used by the federal government in its efforts to combat climate change.

Through her research and eyes-wide-open approach with her students, Jennings is sharpening our sight so we can live in a society in which social justice, good health and plentiful green spaces can be shared by all.