About
Dr Damian Smith
Thirty years of curating and writing across Australia, Asia, Latin America and Europe – and the archive that records it.
Dr Damian Smith (PhD RMIT, MA Art.Cur. Melb., PGrad Art.Hist. Melb., BFA RMIT) is a writer, curator, art historian, academic and gallery director. In 2009 he established Words For Art as a freelance curatorial consultancy. He is currently the Director of the Australasian Cultural Arts Exchange / ACAE Gallery.
An internationally regarded scholar, his research in Beijing saw Dr Smith’s bilingual English Mandarin monograph The Geoff Raby Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art published in 2018. Drawing on the collection of Dr Geoff Raby AO, Australian Ambassador to China (2007-2011), the research illuminated the historic significance of the collection, which evolved through Raby’s close involvement with the nascent contemporary Chinese art scene. Due to popular demand, a 2nd edition was issued by the University of Western Sydney while in 2022, La Trobe University Press, an imprint of Black Inc. published the 3rd revised edition, marking the transfer of the collection to the University.
Damian Smith is a Fellow at the Centre of Visual Art (CoVA), VCA/MCM, University of Melbourne, where he has lectured in Critical & Theoretical Studies (Art).
In 2016 The State Library of Victoria established the Damian Smith Archive, featuring Smith’s numerous essays and articles on contemporary art, including exhibition catalogues, artworks and ephemera related to Australian and international contemporary art. The archive continues to map developments in contemporary Australian art through the work of myriad artists.
Building on work in Cuba (2015-2019) at the Wifredo Lam Centre of Contemporary Art and Mexico (2011) with the Centro Nacional de las Artes, Smith curated the work of 10 Australian artists for the 13th Havana Biennale: The Construction of the Possible, 2019. Staged in the historic Casa de Asia in Old Havana, the exhibition contextualised contemporary Australian art within the discursive framework of the Havana Biennale and its ongoing focus on the Global South.
Dr Smith served as the inaugural Secretary of AICA Australia Inc. (the International Association of Art Critics, sponsored by UNESCO), and was a presenter at AICA World Congresses in Havana and Taipei. In 2019 he was appointed as the inaugural President of the Australian Chinese Art Research Institute, based in Melbourne.
He has written extensively on Australian Modernism and is frequently consulted on the work of Sidney Nolan (1917-1992), having catalogued the artist’s estate in the Welsh Marches, Wales in 1994-99.
The Damian Smith Archive The full record →
Established by the State Library of Victoria in 2016 – essays, articles, exhibition catalogues, artworks and ephemera.
Know-how Doctoral research, 2016
Consulted by arts leaders, curators and researchers, Damian Smith’s 2016 doctoral dissertation Barefoot Curating: Contemporary Art and the Role of the Freelance Curator offers a practical approach to curating in diverse public contexts. The research emerged through working with arts centres in Cuba, Mexico, remote Central Australia, Beijing and Lhasa.
Before the Archive
Long before the biennials and the monographs, a younger Damian Smith was crossing the high passes of Central Asia. These photographs are where the “barefoot curator” begins – and why working in difficult, far-flung places has never been a problem.
