Previously Unknown Podcast Episode 8: Looking and More Looking with Roberta Smith - Features

Text

On this episode of Previously Unknown, we present a conversation featuring Roberta Smith, in her first public appearance since retiring as co-chief art critic at The New York Times and a highlight of the 15th edition of Independent in May. Joining her is Matthew Higgs, Independent’s founding curatorial advisor and director of White Columns. Together, they reflect on Roberta Smith getting her start as an art critic in the 1970s, her sense of loyalty to the readers, and the multitude of changes that have come with her lifetime of looking at, and writing about, art in New York.

Text-Image-1

Previously Unknown Podcast Episode 8: Looking and More Looking with Roberta Smith - Features - Independent Art Fair

Roberta Smith is an acclaimed senior art critic who served as co-chief art critic at The New York Times for more than 32 years. She was born in New York City, raised in Lawrence, Kansas, and earned a B.A. from Grinnell College in 1969. An alumna of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art and the Paula Cooper Gallery before becoming a professional art critic in the 1970s, contributing to Artforum and serving as a senior editor for Art in America. In 1981, she became an art critic for the Village Voice before moving to The New York Times in 1986. In 2003, the College Art Association honored Smith with the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism. In 2019, she was awarded the inaugural Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to art journalism.

Matthew Higgs is the director and chief curator of White Columns, New York’s oldest alternative art space. Over the past thirty years Higgs has organized more than 200 exhibitions and his writing has appeared in more than fifty books and publications. He is currently a Contributing Editor at The Paris Review. Since 2010 Higgs has been the curatorial advisor to Independent and is, with Elizabeth Dee, the cofounder of Independent 20th Century.