Dr. Cherise Smith is Chair of the African and African Diaspora Studies at Black Studies Collective and Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the award-winning author of Michael Ray Charles: Studies in Blackness (University of Texas Press, 2020) which places the artist’s work in the context of the 1990s, the rise in collecting of Black “memorabilia,” and Pop art as well as Enacting Others: the Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Anna Deavere Smith, Nikki S. Lee, and Adrian Piper (Duke University Press, 2011). Curator, culture-worker, and art historian, Dr. Smith is the Founding Executive Director of the Art Galleries at Black Studies, the only museum dedicated to Black art on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Her most recent exhibition, Old Wounds, Dark Dreams, featured works by artists Carrie Mae Weems, Cauleen Smith, Rodney McMillian, and Charles Gaines who are also the subjects of her current book project.
