Nancy Spector

Nancy Spector is an American museum curator who has held positions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City and the Brooklyn Museum.

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.

Spector was appointed as a Guggenheim curator in 1989.

Spector was adjunct curator of the 1997 Venice Biennale and a co-curator of the first Berlin Biennale in 1998.

At the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, she has overseen commissions by Andreas Slominski (1999), Hiroshi Sugimoto (2000), Lawrence Weiner (2000), and Gabriel Orozco (2012), as well as organized the exhibitions Douglas Gordon’s The Vanity of Allegory (2005) and All in the Present Must be Transformed: Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys (2006).

Under the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Spector initiated special commissions by Andreas Slominski in 1999, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Lawrence Weiner in 2000 as well as Gabriel Orozco in 2012.

At the Deutsche Guggenheim Spector organized the exhibitions for

Spector has written catalogue essays for exhibitions on Maurizio Cattelan, Luc Tuymans, Douglas Gordon, Tino Sehgal and Anna Gaskell among others.

Nancy Spector was one of the curators of Monument to Now, an exhibition of the Dakis Joannou Collection, which premiered in Athens in 2004 as an official part of the Olympics program.

In 2007 she was the U.S. Commissioner for the Venice Biennale, where she presented an exhibition of work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

In 2013 she was nominated as "Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator".

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.

In 2019, the Guggenheim hired Chaédria LaBouvier to present her exhibition "Basquiat's Defacement: The Untold Story."

At the conclusion of the show, LaBouvier accused Spector and the larger institution of creating "the most racist professional experience of my life" and criticized her on social media.

In 2020, the Guggenheim hired an external firm to investigate her claims.

It ultimately found "no evidence that Ms. LaBouvier was subject to adverse treatment on the basis of her race."

However, while the investigation was under way, museum employees submitted a public letter to the board, calling for them to "replace those members of the executive cabinet who have repeatedly proven that they are not committed to decisive, anti-racist action and do not act in good faith with BIPOC leaders."

In October 2020, after the investigation's conclusion, Spector voluntarily parted ways with the museum.

At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Spector organized exhibitions and retrospectives.

They include:

She also organized the group exhibitions