ABOUT

Cherise Smith is the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in African American Studies in the department Social & Cultural Analysis at The University of Texas at Austin, where she is also appointed with Art History. Her research centers on African American art, the history of photography, performance, and contemporary art. Smith completed the PhD at Stanford University.

In 2021-2022, Smith was an inaugural residential Scholar of the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute. She has published essays in Art Journal, American Art, and exposure among other venues.  

She is the author of Michael Ray Charles: Studies in Blackness (University of Texas Press, 2020), which won the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The book places the artist’s work in the context of the 1990s, the rise in collecting of Black “memorabilia,” the challenges posed by art censorship, and Pop art among other historical trends. 

Her book, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Duke University Press, 2011), examines how identity is negotiated in performance art in which women artists take-on the characteristics and manners of a racial, ethnic, and gendered “other.”

Currently, she is Executive Director of the Art Galleries at Black Studies. Under its auspices, she created two exhibition spaces—the Idea Lab and the Christian-Green Gallery—and she has overseen donations and acquisitions by leading modern and contemporary artists, including Nicole Awai, Romare Bearden, vanessa german, Norman Lewis, Betelhem Makonnen, Deborah Roberts, Tammie Rubin, and Charles White. 

Smith is privileged to serve on the editorial board of American Art.

Her research has been supported by the Getty Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research at Harvard University. She has worked in the curatorial departments of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Saint Louis Art Museum, among other institutions. 

• Joseph D. Jamail Chair in African American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 2021-Present

• Professor, Departments of Art & Art History and Social & Cultural Analysis, The University of Texas at Austin, 2020-Present

• Professor, Department of African & African Diaspora Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 2020-2026

• Associate Professor, Departments of African & African Diaspora Studies and Art & Art History, The University of Texas at Austin, 2011-2020

• Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Art History, The University of Texas at Austin, 2005-2011

• (Founding) Executive Director, Art Galleries at Black Studies (Christian-Green Gallery and IdeaLab), College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin, 2014-Present

• Organizer (with Drs. Ariel Evans, Gaila Sims, and Delphine Sims), Why Black Museums annual symposium, 2023-Present

• Founder (with Drs. Edmund T. Gordon and Charlie Hale), Black Diaspora Archive, a collaborative project at The University of Texas at Austin, supported by LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, Black Studies, UT Libraries, and the Office of the President, 2014-Present

• Chair, African & African Diaspora Studies Department, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin, 2018-2026

• Leader, Black Studies Collective, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin, 2018-2026

• Member & Section Co-Chair, Eyes of Texas History Committee. Office of the President, University of Texas at Austin, 2020-2021

  Director (with Dr. Daina Ramey Berry), Public Voices Fellowship of the OpEd Project, 2014-2017

• Director, John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin, 2013-2017

• Associate Director, John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin, 2012-2013