Roberta Smith

Roberta Smith is an art critic for the New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art.

Roberta was born in New York City and raised in Lawrence. She studied at Grinnell College in Iowa.

Her career in art started in 1968 while an undergraduate, with a summer internship at Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC followed by a semester in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program in New York. She began writing reviews for Arts Magazine and then Artforum while working as a part time assistant at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, and subsequently wrote for Art in America and then the Village Voice. She has written for the New York Times since 1986 and this fall was named co-chief art critic at the paper. "She is well-known for her clear, insightful and accessible writing style".

In addition to contemporary art, she covers exhibitions of art and artifacts from all periods and cultures, including decorative arts, popular, folk and outsider art and design.

She has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism from the CollegeArt Association in 2003. She lives in New York City with her husband Jerry Saltz, senior art critic for New York Magazine. They were recently listed among New York's "Power Couples" by the New York Observer.