Her 1982 doctoral dissertation followed the life of the Afro-American artist Romare Bearden, and his quest struggle to "create a timeless and enduring body of work without relinquishing his unique individual identity".
Noticing the lack of a facility that could adequately communicate African-American art's "depth and range," she organized a series of exhibitions devoted to the country's leading black artists.
[6] In 1987, New York Mayor Ed Koch, invited Schmidt Campbell to serve as the city's cultural affairs commissioner.
With an annual $172 million budget, the department provides operating and capital improvement funds to 32 major institutions—including museums, theaters, zoos, and botanical gardens—and grants program money to hundreds of neighborhood arts groups.
At her swearing-in ceremony in 1990, she proposed that the city's budget on drug education should be reallocated to her department for cultural and recreational programs for schoolchildren, saying that "if our children can be addicted to the power of language and the excitement of ideas, if they have the benefit of the time and attention of creative adults who have only the highest expectation of them, if excellence and discipline are the standards set for them, they will rise to the occasion.
[12] In 2008, Schmidt Campbell established the Tisch Talent Identification Process, a program that recruits high-performing, high-need students to the school.
[13] Tisch also founded new disciplines and departments, "including a moving image archiving and preservation program, the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music and a dual M.B.A.-M.F.A.
[14] Schmidt Campbell assumed the role of president of Spelman College on August 1, 2015, where she succeeded Beverly Daniel Tatum.
[22] She was previously on the boards of the American Academy in Rome,[23] the New York Shakespeare Festival, and the United Nations International School.
At Syracuse, she has been honored with the Arents Pioneer Medal (1993), a Chancellor's Citation and the College of Arts and Sciences' Distinguished Alumni Award.
[33] She also appeared on MSNBC's PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton to discuss how the coronavirus pandemic is impacting historically Black colleges and universities.