Roberta Smith
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Roberta Smith is an art critic for the New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art.
Born in New York City and raised in Lawrence, Kansas, Smith studied at Grinnell College in Iowa. Her career in the arts started in 1968 while an undergraduate summer intern at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. The following year she was awarded a fellowship to participate in the Independent Study Program (ISP) at the Whitney Museum where she met Donald Judd and became interested in Minimal art. After graduation, she returned to New York City in 1971 to take a secretarial job at the Museum of Modern Art, followed by part-time assistant jobs to Judd and Paula Cooper in 1972. While at the Paula Cooper Gallery she wrote exhibition reviews for Artforum, and subsequently for Art in America, the Village Voice and other publications as well. She began writing for the New York Times in 1986.
Smith has written numerous essays for catalogues and monographs on contemporary artists, and wrote the featured essay in the Judd catalogue raisonné published by the National Gallery of Canada in 1975. In 2003, the College Art Association awarded Smith the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism. She was ranked 80 in ArtReview's guide to the 100 most powerful figures in contemporary art: Power 100, 2010.
Smith is well known for her clear, insightful and accessible writing style. She not only writes about contemporary art but also about the visual arts in general, including decorative arts, popular and outsider art, design, and architecture.
Smith lives in New York City with her husband Jerry Saltz, senior art critic for New York Magazine.
