T’ai Smith is an art and design historian whose research in the areas of textile and fashion theory concern the politics of technology, gender, labor, and economy. Her graduate and undergraduate teaching focuses on modern and contemporary European and American art and design, art historical methodology, visual studies, German critical theory, and media theory.

Author of Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Smith has contributed to numerous volumes, including Anni Albers, On Weaving, New Expanded Edition (Princeton University Press, 2017); and The Textile Reader, 2^nd edition, edited by Jessica Hemmings (Bloomsbury, 2023). Her journal articles have appeared in ARCH+ Journal for Architecture and Urbanism, Art Journal, Counter-Signals, Grey Room, InVisible Culture, Journal of Modern Craft, Leonardo, Texte Zur Kunst, and Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, among others. She has also written for various, international museum and gallery publications, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Generali Foundation, Vienna; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau; Tate Modern, London; David Zwirner Gallery, New York, Kayne Griffin Gallery, Los Angeles, and Pace London. Smith is currently working on two book manuscripts: Textile Theory: Binding Concepts in Modern and Contemporary Art; and Fashion After Capital.

The recipient of several awards and grants, including an American Craft Council Emerging Scholar Award, a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, and a SSHRC Insight Grant (with Amber Frid-Jimenez, Emily Carr University of Art + Design), Smith has been a Wall Scholar in residence at the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies at UBC, and a Senior Fellow at IKKM (Internationales Kolleg für Kulturktechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie) in Weimar, Germany.

Smith regularly works in collaboration with artists and students on curatorial and publishing projects and is a member of the Slow Fashion Research Excellence Cluster at UBC, led by Germaine Koh (Assistant Professor in Visual Art, AHVA). She is currently developing Slow Mode journal with Alexandra Peck (Audain Chair in Historical Indigenous Art, AHVA).

Modern and contemporary European and American art, craft, design, critical and media theory

Selected publications can be found at: https://ubc.academia.edu/TaiSmith

Smith has supervised over a dozen PhD dissertations and MA theses:

Ewé, Tobias Linnemann. “Cybernetic Ears: Modulating the Listener in Sound Art Since the 1960s.” PhD Dissertation. 2024.

Witkowski, Jacqueline. “Disappearing Threads: Art between Text and Textile in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile after 1955.”  PhD Dissertation. 2021.

Árnadóttir, Heida Björk. “The Conceptual, the Romantic, and the Nonhuman: The SÚM Group and the Emergence of Contemporary Art in Iceland, 1965-1978.” PhD Dissertation. 2019.

Warawa, Suzen Leanne. “The Repatriation of Cultural Belongings: Transformations and Restrictions Reconsidered Through DRIPA Legislation.” MA Thesis. 2022.

Kindsfather, Erika. “Intermedia Wearables: The Politics of Social and Spatial Transformation in Evelyn Roth’s Textile and Performance art, 1965-1975.” MA Thesis. 2021.

Loewen, Nicholas. “Making Light: Criticality and Carousel Projection in the work of Marcel Broodthaers and Allan Sekula.” MA Thesis. 2020.

Sterba, Anika. “The Magazine as Surrealist Object: VVV and the Reanimation of a Movement in New York during World War II.” MA Thesis. 2019.

Finucane, Blake. “Creating with Blockchain Technology: The ‘Provably Rare’ Possibilities of Crypto Art.” MA Thesis. 2018.

Gatto, Stella. “New Cuts, Dark Continents: Hannah Höch’s ‘From an Ethnographic Museum.’” MA Thesis. 2018.

Ariss, Alison. “Wrapped in Wool and Copper: Encountering Musqueam Art at Vancouver’s Granville at 70th development project.” MA Thesis. 2017.

Ullrich, Madeline. “Partial Vision: Remediations of the Algerian Veil in Film and Scholarship After Fanon.” MA Thesis. 2017.

Blouin, Chanel. “West Coast Bauhaus: A Case Study of the Oberlander Residence.” MA Thesis. 2017.

Woolley, Heather Lauren. “Modern Acheiropoieta: The Veil of Veronica in the Age of the Jacquard Loom.” MA Thesis. 2016.

Witkowski, Jacqueline. “Ever Present, Never Presented: Suzanne Lacy, Feminism, and Quilting.” MA Thesis. 2014.