Jennifer Smit

The Curaçaoan professor Jennifer Smit (1951) is an art historian, independent curator and author. She writes art reviews for the Antilliaans Dagblad. In 1996 she published the reference book “Monuments and Statues of the Netherlands Antilles”. In 1999 she was the curator of the mega art exhibition “Arte 99” in Curaçao. With Adi Martis she wrote “Arte” in 2001, the first overview of the history of the visual arts in the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba. In 2003 she was awarded the prestigious Cola Debrot prize for culture from the island territory of Curaçao. In 2010 she and Felix de Rooy organized the exhibition “Antepasado di Futuro: Curaçao Classics Visual Arts 1900-2010”. Their eponymous book was published in 2012. That same year she wrote an essay about Curaçao for the Yale publication “Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World”. In 2014, at the commemoration of 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the Kingdom, she curated the exhibition “Exploring the Past to Envisage the Future” in the Curaçao Museum in 2014.