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Since
beginning a full time writing career in 1991, Paul Chaat Smith has
emerged as one of the decade's leading voices on issues of American Indian
art, identity, mass culture and politics.
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Since beginning a full time writing career in 1991, Paul Chaat Smith has emerged as one of the decade's leading voices on issues of American Indian art, identity, mass culture and politics.
Paul Chaat Smith
Appointed Critic in Residence three times in galleries in the U.S. and Canada, Smith has curated exhibitions, written catalog essays, and organized film exhibitions. He has lectured at the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles. In 1994 the Sundance Institute asked him to contribute an essay for their catalog and chair a panel at that year's festival on recent Indian movies and Hollywood. In 1995, he appeared on the cable television program Markings with Neil Bissondath. The one hour interview, titled "Black Elk Reconsidered," aired nationally in Canada.
Smith wrote the lead essay for Strong Hearts: Native American Voices and Visions, (Aperture, 1995) which included work by Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo and Leslie Silko. A Washington Post review of the exhibition during its appearance at the Smithsonian in October 1996 said "it is a measure of Smith's insight-not to mention his integrity-that his introductory essay to a remarkable new book of photographs, of Indians by Indians, makes a point not to gloss over the bad while accenting the good."
He is the co-author of Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, published by New Press in August, 1996. Released in paperback in the summer of 1997, the book has won acclaim from Publishers Weekly ("detailed, lively history. . . an important addition"), Booklist ("a compelling, fast-paced chronicle, makes clear this era of 'guerrilla theater' is of great and lasting significance"), and Martin Cruz Smith ("the authors write with a rare mix of passion and objectivity"). Smith and co-author Robert Allen Warrior promoted the book in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Washington, and New York during the summer and fall of 1996, appearing on numerous local and national radio and television programs, including the Derek McGinty Show in Washington and the Michael Jackson Show in Los Angeles.
At the age of nineteen he joined the Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and later became the founding editor of the American Indian Movement's Treaty Council News. Smith is an enrolled member of the Comanche Tribe of Oklahoma. His middle name is correctly pronounced as if it had a single o instead of two a's, and rhymes with hot.
