Staff Profile
Conservator of Paintings and Head of Paintings Lab
kate_smith@harvard.edu / 617-496-1901
M.A., Buffalo State College
B.A., Smith College
Kate Smith studies and preserves objects in the museums’ paintings collection, from ancient Roman fresco fragments to 20th-century oil paintings. She specializes in the technical examination of paintings using radiography, infrared reflectography, and luminescence imaging to investigate artists’ materials and techniques. With her Straus Center colleagues, Smith teaches conservation-focused courses at Harvard, including HAA 101: The Making of Art and Artifacts: History, Material and Technique; HAA 206: Science and the Practice of Art History; and the Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art (SITSA).
Recent Publications
“Lifting the Veil from Herbert Bayer’s Verdure.” In Object Lessons: The Bauhaus and Harvard, ed. Laura Muir. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Art Museums, 2020.
Cristina Morilla, Narayan Khandekar, Kate Smith, and Anne Schaffer. “Coloured Grounds and Transfer Techniques in 17th-Century Spanish Royal Portraiture: The Case of Pantoja de la Cruz’s Portrait of Philip III at the Harvard Art Museums.” In Ground Layers in European Painting 1550–1750, eds. Anne Haack Christensen, Angela Jager, and Joyce H. Townsend. London: Archetype Publications, 2020.
Elizabeth M. Molacek, Kate Smith, Katherine Eremin, Lucy J. Cooper, and Georgina Rayner. “Re-Discovering a Roman Wall Painting at Harvard: New Research on a Fragment from the Villa at Boscotrecase.” Studies in Conservation 65 (5) (2020): 296–311.
Theresa Hensick, Anthony Sigel, Henry Lie, Narayan Khandekar, Kate Smith, Francesca G. Bewer, Angela Chang et al. “Protection and Relocation of Frescoes during Construction at the Harvard Art Museums.” In Subliming Surfaces: Volatile Binding Media in Heritage Conservation, ed. Christina Rozeik, 141–52. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Museums, 2019.