Deirdre Madeleine Smith

I am a scholar of contemporary art and visual culture who writes and teaches on artworks, exhibits and other artifacts that distinctively mediate ethical and ontological questions and problems. As an art historian, I often turn explicitly to what I view as the essential questions of the discipline: What is art? What is an artist? I approach these inquiries not as invitations to metaphysics, but rather to parsing the complexly socially- and historically-contingent and discursive ways that humans have attempted to respond to them. This focus has often led me to write and teach on the history of avant-garde practices in the 20th and 21st centuries, especially conceptual and performance art. My dissertation and related publication projects concern the philosophy of labor, particularly artistic labor, in the context of socialist Yugoslavia in the 1960s through the 1980s. I write about the work of a generation of experimental artists who developed complex, ambivalent relationships to artmaking as professional practice in dialogue with the ideology of non-aligned, self-management socialism. In other essays and articles on contemporary art, I have taken up subjects including Adrian Piper’s What Will Become of Me (1985-ongoing) and Maja Smrekar’s K-9_Topology: Hybrid Family (2016)—artworks that blur and disrupt the boundaries of what can constitute a work of art in order to further disrupt other categories of being and identity. I have also recently considered and written about the boundary-pushing question of whether nonhuman animals can themselves make art and be considered artists.

At Pitt, my joint role as a Teaching Assistant Professor of Museum Studies and an Assistant Curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) draws me into more interdisciplinary approaches to the history of visual culture and philosophical inquiry. One of my core responsibilities is teaching the course “Inside the Museum,” in which my students and I treat CMNH as a hub for practical and experiential learning in museum studies. Students in “Inside the Museum” gain an introduction to the breadth of roles and careers that make museums function, and the lived reality of labor and ethical decision-making in these careers. We spend time in the museum’s, galleries, storage spaces, library, and in conversation with its staff. Students learn about the history of CMNH, and develop projects connected to key topics of concern at the museum today, especially contending with the legacy of the specific ways in which natural history museums are entangled with histories of colonialism. In addition to teaching “Inside the Museum,” I am happy to support undergraduate and graduate students through thesis supervision, independent studies, and other forms of mentorship around topics related to: conceptual and performance art, the art of socialist Yugoslavia, posthuman philosophy and critical animal studies, museum studies, and museum careers.

In my capacity as Assistant Curator at CMNH, I have delved into the history of the museum and its collection, developing projects and convening conversations on the museum’s dioramas, the contributions to the collection of Presbyterian missionaries stationed in Cameroon in the early twentieth century, the museum’s collection of contemporary naturalist and scientific illustration, among other topics.