TK Smith

TK Smith is an Atlanta-based curator, writer, and cultural historian. He was appointed Curator Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in 2024. From 2022 to 2024, he served as the Assistant Curator: Art of the African Diaspora at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. While there, he was the venue curator of William Edmondson: A Monumental Vision (2023) and Sue Williamson and Lebohang Kganye: Tell Me What You Remember (2023). His independent projects include Hand to Mouth at Stove Works (2024), Kelly Taylor Mitchell & Sergio Suárez: Material Memory at Swan Coach House Gallery (2024), Roland Ayers: Calligraphy of Dreams at the Woodmere Museum of Art (2021), and Virtual Remains at the Atlanta Contemporary in conjunction with the Atlanta Biennial (2021). As a Tina Dunkley Curatorial Fellow, he curated Zipporah Camille Thompson: Looming Chaos at the Zuckerman Museum of Art (2020). In 2023, he completed a curatorial residency at Yinka Shonibare’s G.A.S. Residency in Lagos, Nigeria. Smith's writing has been published in several exhibition catalogues, academic journals, and periodicals. He has contributed to Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, and ART PAPERS, where he is a contributing editor. In 2021, he was invited to be the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Vashon Artist Residency in Washington. In 2022, he was the recipient of an Andy Warhol Writers Grant for short form writing. He was invited to be Monument Lab’s 2022-2023 writer-in-residence. In 2024, he was awarded a Leo and Dorothea Rabkin Prize for art criticism. Currently, Smith is a doctoral candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware.