degrees in art history (1978) at the University of Pennsylvania, she worked on topics of importance to this emerging field.Īfter graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Smith taught several classes as a lecturer at UC San Diego, and then relocated to the Bay Area where she worked as a labor arbitrator and co-authored two books and an educational film on labor relations. These were the years that the first women’s studies programs were established in the United States, so when Smith completed her master’s (1971) and Ph.D. Smith received a bachelor’s degree with honors (1968) from Swarthmore College where she studied history and philosophy, and then pursued a year of graduate work in Medieval Studies at Yale University. Her later articles extend this exploration of the disruptive power of art through a treatment of female nudity and the female gaze. Her book “The Power of Women: A ‘Topos’ in Medieval Art and Literature” expands the range of works (texts as well as images) into a comprehensive study and, more importantly, provides a theoretical and conceptual context which explicates how it is that art promotes values and ideas that contest, and sometimes even transgress, the ideology of the dominant social groups who commission it, and are its primary viewers. Smith’s writing is distinguished by its intelligent and sensitive attention to images, not only in painting, sculpture and manuscript illustration, but also on textiles, mirrors, jewelry, trinket boxes and prints, genres then all too often considered on the periphery of art. The work shows how a theme invented by patristic fathers to advocate for male celibacy and promulgated by theologians, preachers and moralists to warn about women - and thereby denigrate and control them - became a vehicle in secular art to explore the ways “feminine wiles” were deployed by women to triumph over men. Her groundbreaking dissertation “’To Women's Wiles I Fell’: The Power of Women ‘Topos’ and the Development of Medieval Secular Art" (University of Pennsylvania, 1978) was one of the most widely cited and influential art history dissertations of the period and became a standard foundational text in the then newly established field of women’s studies. Smith was among the first art historians to study medieval art from a feminist perspective. Smith is best known for her pioneering work in feminist art history and the excellence of her administrative contributions to UC San Diego, both as a chair of the Department of Visual Arts and Provost of John Muir College. Professor Smith died on April 5 at UC San Diego Health Jacobs Medical Center of complications arising from her long and brave battle with cancer. It is with heavy hearts that the Department of Visual Arts announces the passing of dear friend and valued colleague Professor Emerita Susan L.
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