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Elizabeth A. T. Smith

American curator and museum executive who contributed a catalogue essay examining Buckminster Fuller's impact on contemporary artists for the Whitney Museum retrospective.

Updated 2026-07-30 low confidence cold

Elizabeth A. T. Smith

American curator, art critic, and museum executive; James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Elizabeth A. T. Smith is an American curator and art historian whose career has centered on contemporary art and architecture exhibitions at major museums. As James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, she helped bring the Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe exhibition to Chicago after its Whitney Museum debut. She previously served at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, building expertise in the intersection of contemporary art, architecture, and design.

Smith's curatorial work and criticism focus on the ways contemporary artists engage with interdisciplinary thinking, systems, and the legacies of modernism -- concerns that connect directly to the expansive, cross-disciplinary character of Fuller's practice.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: chronicler. Smith contributed the essay "Buckminster Fuller and Contemporary Artists" to Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2008). Her essay examines how R. Buckminster Fuller's ideas -- utopian and visionary thinking about systems, the structural and aesthetic manifestations of integrity, the relationship between pragmatism and vision -- resonate in recent and current contemporary art practice. She traces Fuller's influence through artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Sarah Sze, Andrea Zittel, Pedro Reyes, and others, showing how Fuller's synthetic, interdisciplinary approach and his emphasis on intuition and spirituality set him apart from other modernists and made him an enduring touchstone for a generation of artists concerned with cross-disciplinary investigation.

See Also

Sources

  • Buckminster Fuller Starting with the Universe (source reference) — Zotero record for the exhibition catalog