Terry Smith, Slade Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Cambridge, presents fresh perspectives on Italian Renaissance painting, modernist art in France and the Americas, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and world contemporary art in a series of lectures at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Founded in 1869 through a bequest from Felix Slade, the Slade Professorship at Cambridge has been held by many of the world’s leading art historians, from John Ruskin to Ernst Gombrich, Griselda Pollock and Virginia Spate.
Drawing on 50 years of research, these lectures bring together several ongoing personal projects and offer close readings of how artists have used visual perception, emotional intelligence and conceptualisation to both manifest and transform major aspects of human world picturing.
This series premieres in Sydney over four consecutive Tuesdays in August, offering audiences a rare opportunity to encounter Professor Smith’s evolving scholarship and the ideas shaping his upcoming publication.
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 the author of numerous books on contemporary art and curatorial practice, most recently Curating the complex and the open strike (2021), Iconomy: towards a political economy of images (2022), Six paintings from Papunya: a conversation (with Fred R Myers, 2024) and the edited volume Okwui Enwezor: selected writings (2025).
A founding board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, he has served on the board of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and is board member emeritus of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
Presented in partnership with the University of Sydney’s Power Institute.
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