Talking Contemporary Curating

Since the publication of Thinking Contemporary Curating in 2012, art historian Terry Smith has continued his travels through the globalizing art world, talking to curators. The dozen searching conversations in this book--with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Claire Bishop, Zdenka Badovinac, Mami Kataoka, Mari Carmen Ramirez, Okwui Enwezor, Germano Celant, Jens Hoffmann, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Maria Lind, Zoe Butt and Boris Groys--provide a vivid sense of contemporary curatorial thought at work. They show curators deeply immersed in thinking about the exigencies of practice, the contexts of exhibition-making, the platforms through which art may be made public, and about what their work can contribute toward understanding what it means to be alive today.
Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2010 he was named Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate by the Australian Government, and won the Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA). He is the author of Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993); The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006), What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011) and Thinking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, 2012).