Craig
Smith
School of Art + Art History
Associate Professor
Specialization: Performance, Photography, Relational Art
T: (352)
273-3025
F: (352)
392-8453
E:
c.smith@ufl.edu
Address:
PO Box 115801
Gainesville, FL 32611
View Research Biography
Dr. Craig Smith is an American media artist whose art and research focuses on the process, aesthetics, and ethics of human‐to‐human interactivity in contemporary art, especially photography, sound, and socially engaged performances. Smith’s practice includes the production of photography, performance art, sonic art, video, writing and sound recordings. He has had twenty-one solo exhibitions of photography and other media in the last ten years of his career and has published the books Training Manual for Relational Art (2009) as well as On the Subject of the Photographic (2007). His exhibitions of photography, live sound performances, lectures, and other art media have been featured at an international range of museums, galleries, art fairs, athletic facilities, and financial organizations including the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., PS1MOMA Contemporary Art Institute in New York, The Tate Modern in London, The George Eastman House in Rochester, the Hudson River Museum, and the Burchfield Penney Art Center as well as galleries and art fairs including CEPA Gallery (Buffalo), Galerie Schuster Photo (Berlin), RARE Art (New York), SCM Hong Kong, ARTSPACE Sydney, The Kent Gallery and White Columns (New York), and the Scope Art fairs in London, New York, and Miami. Smith has created photographs for documentary films by the directors Brad Beesley (Fearless Freaks, Okie Noodling, Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo) and Ben Steinbauer (Winnebago Man). In 2011 Smith and Dave Copenhaver released a full length sound recording entitled "The Parasite: A Sound and Text Composition" based on a remix of Michel Serres' fable Le Parasite. "The Parasite" as been presented live as a multimedia sound and stage performance at the Burchfield Penney Art Center and the Price Tower Art Center (Frank Lloyd Wright's only existing skyscraper).
Smith has been awarded grants from numerous organizations including the New York State Council on the Arts as well as the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Smith is currently curating the exhibition Art of Sport (opening September 20, 2013) using diverse conceptual aesthetic modes to address the social engagement with a culture of competitive sports in the United States and abroad. The exhibition will feature an international group of artists including Craig Smith, Lee Walton, John Baldessari, Daria Martin, Paul Pfeiffer, Brad Beesely, Mitch Miller, Hans van der Meer, Vesna Pavlovic' and Catherine Opie.
Smith’s forthcoming book publication, entitled Relational Art: A Guided Tour, will be published by I.B. Tauris, LTD from London in 2014.
Craig Smith is an alumnus of the Whitney Museum of Art's Independent Study Program (Studio, 2009) as well as the American Photography Institute (2007). Smith complted his PhD entitled: Structuring Interactivy; Space and Time in Relational Art, at the University of London, Goldsmiths College Centre for Cultural Studies (2007). Smith has held teaching positions at numerous universities and colleges including New York University, Goldsmiths College, and the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London). Smith joined the University of Florida in 2010.