The Damian Smith Archive

The State Library of Victoria established the Damian Smith Archive in 2016 as a repository recognising Damian’s work as an essayist and curator. It honours the work of myriad contemporary artists, mostly Australian, through maintaining copies of his texts, catalogues and articles on contemporary art. Included here is the work of more than 207 artists, as well as artworks and ephemera.

The Archive is an ongoing project that maps developments in contemporary Australian art, primarily through the work of a single curator.

The idea

The idea of building a research archive was inspired by the legendary curator Harald Szeemann (1933-2005), whose papers are housed at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. In curatorial terms, Szeemann is a seminal figure who created such projects as “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form”, 1969. Szeemann’s work has inspired generations of contemporary curators and continues to do so today.

Archive highlights include:

• essays on contemporary Australian art;

• unique documents on the Australian artist Sidney Nolan;

• photographic portraits of contemporary Tibetan artists;

• primary documents of the 2015 and 2019 Bienal de la Habana, Cuba;

• artworks by the American-Irish conceptualist Robert Janz.

• 2022In 2022, with the assistance of Creative Victoriaarts academic and researcher Victoria Perin conducted an analysis of the Archive, with her review published on the State Library of Victoria Blog. According to Perin:
• –While Smith has worked in and with institutionsprimarily, he must be understood as a freelance curator. His curatorial independence is his defining characteristic as an arts worker, and it fundamentally explains why the archive is the way it is.
• –Perin goes on to say that:

It is rare to find a record of an individual like Smith in a place like State Library Victoria, an institution that is better situated to record the careers of other institutional professionals, such as the senior curators and directors of state or national galleries. However, we must remember that a healthy art community (both local and international) relies on figures that move quickly between commissions, code-switch through high and colloquial cultures, and translate between foreign lands. The record of Damian Smith’s career is the archive of one such figure.

A comprehensive list of the artists represented is kept in the Artist index.