Contemporary artists today are increasingly driven to consider the complex multiplicity of our world, at times attempting to navigate positive pathways through the ‘polycrisis’ – the many simultaneous crises (environmental, economic, political) – in which we are engulfed. This cosmographic impulse to picture, or even create this world anew, informs new artworks across traditional and contemporary artistic mediums, from painting and sculpture to digital, performance, and participatory art.
In this special event, eminent art historian Professor Terry Smith joins us in Melbourne to explore some of the visual frameworks that artists deploy to create what he terms ‘new cosmographies’, asking if their imagery gets us closer to the constructive ‘world picturing’ that we need today. How does this compare to the ‘machine vision’ of a world increasingly constructed through digital platforms? And in the political sphere, how might visual artists intervene critically against rising tides of authoritarianism?
Through an illustrated presentation drawing on five decades of research, Professor Smith will explore how artists such as Emily Kam Kngwarray, Gordon Bennett, Imants Tillers, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, William Kentridge, Ai Weiwei, Trevor Paglen, Wang Tuo and Archie Moore have responded, and are responding, to these challenges.
After the presentation, Professor Smith will be joined by Associate Professor Anthony White, Head of Art History and Curatorship at The University of Melbourne, for a Q&A.
Terry Smith is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney and Andrew W Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of numerous books on contemporary art and curatorial practice, most recently Curating the complex and the open strike (2021), Iconomy: towards a political economy of images (2022), Six paintings from Papunya: a conversation (with Fred R Myers, 2024) and the edited volume Okwui Enwezor: selected writings (2025). A founding board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, he has served on the board of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and is Board Member Emeritus of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
This talk builds on a presentation given in Professor Smith’s eight-part lecture series “Frames of Vision, Images as Ideas: The Intelligence of Artists”, originally held at the University of Cambridge, UK, for the 2026 Slade Lectures in Fine Art, delivered in his capacity as the Slade Professor of Fine Art 2025-26.
About the Slade Professorship in Fine Art
The Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge was founded in 1869 as the result of a bequest from the art collector Felix Slade (1788-1868). At the same time, similar chairs were founded in the Universities of Oxford and London. Beginning with John Ruskin, the Slade Professorship of Fine Art has been held on an annual basis by many of the most distinguished historians of art and architecture from around the world, among them James Ackerman, Anthony Blunt, Anita Brookner, Roger Fry, Ernst Gombrich, Nicholaus Pevsner, Griselda Pollock, Virginia Spate (former Director of the Power Institute), and Rudolf Wittkower
This event is presented in partnership with the Australian Institute of Art History, Faculty of Arts, the University of Melbourne.
Professor Smith will also be presenting a talk on Wednesday 7 October at the University of Melbourne titled Shadows in the Cave: Seeing as Knowing in the History of Art.
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