Michigan State University

Arts and Letters College Directory

Laura Smith

  • (she, her)
  • Professor
  • Art, Art History and Design
Biography

Laura Smith received a Ph.D. in U.S. art history from Indiana University in 2008 and holds a MA in Native American art history from the University of New Mexico (2002).   She is affiliated faculty with American Indian and Indigenous Studies.  Her teaching philosophy connects with the broader scope of her research to construct a more inclusive art history by bringing attention to the ways art institutions and the conventional boundaries of art history have privileged white male visual media and artists.

Smith is the author of Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). Her research largely focuses on Indigenous artists who have used technical inventions (such as photography, video, and digital media) to control representation, affirm and explore identities, and to challenge their disenfranchisement under American settler colonialism. Her writings have been featured in the Journal of Communication and Languages, No. 57, Special Issue: Decolonizing visuality: Looks, Consciences, Ways of Thinking and Acting (December 2022), Visualities II: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art (Michigan State University Press, 2019), PUBLIC: Art, Culture and Ideas, Special Issue: Indigenous Digital and New Media Art (2016), Locating American Art: Finding Art’s Meaning in Museums (Ashgate, 2016), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian exhibition catalogue For the Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw (2014), American Indian Art Magazine, Great Plains Quarterly, and Third Text.

 

Works

“Beyond Surface Matters: Unsettling Views of a Western American Landscape,” Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens (Journal of Communication and  Languages), No. 57, Special Issue: Decolonizing visuality: Looks, Consciences, Ways of Thinking and Acting, December 2022.

“Indigenizing Canadian Settler Monuments of Indians:  Ehren Bear Witness Thomas’ Make Your Escape (2010),” in Visualities II: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art, Denise Cummings, ed.  Michigan State University Press, 2019.

Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity (University of Nebraska Press, June 2016).

“Complex Negotiations: Beadwork, Gender, and Modernism in Horace Poolaw’s Portrait of Two Kiowa Women,” in Locating American Art:  Finding Art’s Meaning in Museums, Cynthia Fowler, ed., Ashgate Press, January 2016.

“On Indigenous Digit-al Media and Augmented Realities in Will Wilson’s eyeDazzler: Trans-customary Portal to Another Dimension,” PUBLIC: Art, Culture and Ideas, Special Issue: Indigenous Digital and New Media Art, Julie Nagam, Carla Taunton, Heather Igloliorte, eds., December 2016.

“Beaded Buckskins and Bad-Girl Bobs: Kiowa Female Identity, Industry, and Activism in Horace Poolaw’s Portraits,” in For the Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw, exhibition catalogue. New York and Washington, D.C.: The National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, in association with Yale University Press, 2014.

“Modernity, Multiples, and Masculinity:  Horace Poolaw’s Postcards of Elder Kiowa Men,” Great Plains Quarterly 31 (2), Spring 2011.
“Picturing Zuni in the New Deal Era: The Clara Brignac Gonzales Collection of Zuni Day School Drawings and Paintings, 1925-1945,” American Indian Art Magazine, Spring 2005.

“Photography, Criticism, and Native American Women’s Identity: Three Works by Jolene Rickard,” Third Text, 19:1, 2005.

Pedagogical Projects
Immersive Pedagogy and Visual Accessibility Lesson Plan: “Relational Landscapes: Teaching Chaco Canyon with Immersive Technology (Version II),” Digital Library Pedagogy Group (#DLFteach) Toolkit 2.0, July 2021. https://dlfteach.pubpub.org/dlfteach-toolkit-2

Immersive Pedagogy Lesson Plan: “Land and Belonging: Teaching North American Landscape Art with Immersive Technology,” Digital Library Pedagogy Group (#DLFteach) Toolkit 2.0, July 2021. https://dlfteach.pubpub.org/dlfteach-toolkit-2

Curatorial Work

3D Perspectives: Re(Imag)ining Keystone View Company Stereographs of Indigenous Peoples, an online exhibit and blog, curated in collaboration with Megan Kudzia (Digital Scholarship Lab, MSU Main Library) and various Indigenous artists and cultural specialists. https://smit1550.msu.domains/omeka-s/s/3d-perspectives/page/home

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