Smith's 1986 doctoral dissertation became "Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America" (University of Chicago Press, 1993), winner of the inaugural Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Prize in 2009 for the best book on modern American art published in the past 25 years. The committee of jurors for the book prize they chose Smith's book because of its "excellence of writing and scholarship, its originality and its outstanding and multi-faceted exploration of the emergence and flourishing of modernism as a phenomenon in American art and culture."