Galerie Lelong & Co. is pleased to hold a virtual conversation as part of "Galerie Lelong: Dialogues" between Samm Kunce and Catherine Morris on occasion of our solo exhibition Nancy Spero: Woman as Protagonist (February 23 – March 25, 2023).
The exhibition is dedicated to works created between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, the final two decades of the artist’s life. Throughout a career spanning over five decades, the New York-based artist Nancy Spero (b. 1926 – d. 2009) foregrounded women’s experiences, challenging systems of authority and subverting aesthetic conventions in the process. Frustrated with the pervasive silencing of women’s voices in society, Spero was an activist who devoted herself to the advancement of women in the arts through hosting and participating in discussion groups, many held in her SoHo loft. Beginning in 1976, Spero made women the sole subject of her work to elevate their status from “other” to protagonist. In celebration of Spero’s unapologetic advocacy for the presence of women in the arts, the exhibition will coincide with Women’s History Month.
Samm Kunce is an artist who in 1986 joined the Nancy Spero team while still in school at the San Francisco Art Institute on a one-year NYC residency. She remained in New York to manage the Spero and (Leon) Golub studio for the remainder of their lives, continuing afterwards at the Spero Golub Foundation for the Arts through 2021. She was responsible for development and installation of most of their museum installations over the decades as well. She simultaneously earned an MFA at Bard and developed her own practice in New York and Europe, exhibiting at various domestic and international venues. Kunce currently lives and works in the Catskill Mountains continuing her investigation into our unnaturally natural environment. Permanent expressions can be viewed in mosaic form “Under Bryant Park,” commissioned by the New York MTA and others in Queens and Los Angeles but typically takes an ephemeral process form resulting in documentation and artifacts.
Catherine Morris is the Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum where, since 2009, she has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions including We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985, Judith Scott-Bound and Unbound, and Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art. She has worked on projects examining contemporary practices through historical precedents, including the museum-wide Sackler Center 10 year anniversary project, The Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum and two collection-based exhibitions: Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection and Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection. Morris currently serves on the CAPE National Advisory Council, Archives of American Art Journal Advisory Board and the Art Beyond Sight Board of Advisors.
Photo of Catherine Morris by Grace Roselli for Pandora’s BoxX Project.
