The Art of Research with Katherine Smith

Hearing Katherine Smith’s twenty year journey from the dawn of her interest in how artists represented the physical world and its perception in her earlier years, to her current research into Claes Oldenburg was really interesting. Her curiosity and scholarship began with a book entitled, Learning from Las Vegas, written by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. The book and the work of Brown and Venturi led her on a journey of discovery about why the authors described a piece by Oldenburg as they did. Smith ultimately centered her dissertation around that idea and the other concepts she found in the book.

Years later, Katherine Smith is still delving deeper into artists and ideas sparked by Learning from Las Vegas. Professor Smith seems interested in understanding the how and why of the structure of a piece, particularly the physical world and its perception represented in a piece of work. Her interest in Claes Oldenburg falls within this line of thinking and the public spaces where some of his works stand. For the past 10 years, Professor Smith has been looking into sculpture in relation to the city, and writing a book about the works of Claes Oldenburg. In class we discussed the process of contextualizing a piece of work in relation to the overall body of art produced by an artist. The process of researching up to the time period when the artist produced the piece you are interested in to get a sense of the journey they took to create the piece–adding context to the overall meaning of the work. We also did an exercise using some resources from Professor Smith’s own collection and discussed when to use what sources when taking a closer look at a piece of art.

In general, it was really informative to hear how Professor Smith started her journey into scholarship and how that translated into her career as a professor now. How she started by figuring out what attracted to her a certain artist or genres of art, and then narrowing down to some key themes and artists that fit within the realm she wanted to explore. Learning how to balance and choose ideas to explore can be difficult in the process of scholarship. Professor Smith’s idea of keeping a list of all her interests is something that I will personally start doing because I have all of these ideas, but it seems like there is very little time for them.

Professor Smith’s insight is particularly important to this class when thinking about the research and scholarship we will have to delve into for our community hour talks and our research topics. Professor Smith’s lecture gave a look into what this process looks like from beginning to end: from a spark of curiosity to producing scholarly work on that subject. It is good to see a real life example and learning the steps I can take in my own research in this course.