Dr. Cherise Smith is a professor of Art History and Social & Cultural Analysis at The University of Texas at Austin, specializing in American art after 1945, especially as it intersects with the politics of identity, race, and gender. She is founding Executive Director of the Art Galleries at Black Studies, which consist of the Christian-Green Gallery and IdeaLab. Cherise previously chaired the department of African and African Diaspora Studies, directed the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies and co-directed the Op-Ed Project. From 2021 to 2022 she was an inaugural Scholar of the Getty Research Institute’s African American Art History Initiative. Her award-winning book, Michael Ray Charles: A Retrospective (University of Texas Press, 2020), surveys Charles’s career, exploring the artist’s “sampling” approach to provocative anti-black stereotypes, as well as his analysis of African American masculinity and sports culture.
WORKS IN PROGRESS
Northwestern University Program of African Studies, Monday Night Graduate Seminars for students from various disciplines, guest speaker Kenneth Onwuka Dike, c. 1957. Melville J. and Frances S. Herskovits, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
“Commentaries: Thinking Black Studies and Art History Together” in American Art
Co-edited with Tiffany K. Barber and Ariel Evans (forthcoming).
Cauleen Smith, Remote Viewing, 2011 (still)
Book manuscript
Healing Old Wounds (under contract)