TK Smith will continue writing about art that occupies, interrogates, or reimagines landscapes and public space. Expanding upon previous projects, such as his 2020 essay for Art Papers, “Toward a Monumental Black Body,” Smith will investigate how contemporary artists are subverting, shifting, and expanding upon how we understand relations to history, our environment, and each other. Using the contemporary discourse on historic monuments as a point of departure, Smith looks to contemporary artists whose interventions upon the land and the canons of Western art make space for the erased, marginalized, and fragmented histories of specific geographies and communities.
TK Smith is a Philadelphia-based curator, writer, and cultural historian. His writing has appeared in such publications as Art in America, Monument Lab Bulletin, and Art Papers, where he is a contributing editor. In 2021, he was invited to be the inaugural writer-in-residence at Vashon Artist Residency. He has also been invited to guest lecture at the Pennsylvania Academia of Fine Arts, the Flaten Art Museum, and the Barnes Foundation, among other institutions. Smith is a doctoral student in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware, where he researches art, material culture, and the built environment.