Rate My Professor Pamela Smart

Pamela Smart is an associate professor of art history and anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. She holds the position of Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Programmatic Initiatives in the Harpur College of Arts and Sciences. Smart earned her BA (Hons) from the University of Otago in New Zealand, followed by an MA and PhD from Rice University. Her doctoral dissertation, titled Sacred Modern: An Ethnography of an Art Museum, laid the foundation for her ethnographic approach to art institutions.

Smart's research centers on the anthropology of artworlds, museums, critical aesthetics, and affective modalities of experience. She investigates the crafting of affect, including aesthetic sensibility in exhibitionary practices, technical expertise in maintaining atmospheric pressure as seen in the Rothko Chapel restoration, the visceral impact of materials such as mid-twentieth-century acrylic paints, and contemporary experiments with art museum forms and functions. Her teaching encompasses museum studies, aesthetic theory, artworlds, materials, and materiality. Key publications include the book Sacred Modern: Faith, Activism, and Aesthetics in the Menil Collection (2011), which examines faith, activism, and aesthetics at the Menil Collection; Rothko Chapel (2021), co-authored with Stephen Fox; Possession: Intimate Artifice at The Menil Collection in Modernism/modernity (2006); Crafting Aura: Art Museums, Audiences and Engagement in Visual Anthropology Review (2000); and Ivan Karp (1943–2011) in African Arts (2012). She has contributed to interdisciplinary initiatives, including seed grants for projects like Materials Matter and Paint and Its Afterlives. Smart received the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, recognizing her contributions to art history and anthropology.