Nancy Spector

In 2017, when the White House requested the loan of a Vincent van Gogh painting, from the Guggenheim collection, Landscape With Snow, Spector suggested instead, America - a sculpture of a gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan.

Spector is a recipient of the Peter Norton Family Foundation Curators Award and an International Art Critics Association Award. In 2014, she was named one of the top 25 most important women in the art world by Artnet. Additionally, Forbes named Spector on the “40 Women To Watch Over 40” list.

Spector was adjunct curator of the 1997 Venice Biennale and a co-curator of the first Berlin Biennale in 1998. In 2007 she was the U.S. Commissioner for the Venice Biennale, where she presented an exhibition of work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She has written catalogue essays for exhibitions on Maurizio Cattelan, Luc Tuymans, Douglas Gordon, Tino Sehgal and Anna Gaskell among others.

Spector graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy from Sarah Lawrence College in 1981. She received an M.A. from Williams College in 1984 and a Master of Philosophy degree in Art History from City University Graduate Center in 1997 She has been a Guggenheim curator since 1989. At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, she has organized exhibitions and retrospectives on or of conceptual photography, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle, Richard Prince, Louise Bourgeois, Marina Abramovic, Maurizio Cattelan and Tino Sehgal. She also organized the group exhibitions Moving Pictures (2003), Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) (2004), and theanyspacewhatever (2008). Under the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Spector initiated special commissions by Andreas Slominski, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Lawrence Weiner.