NEW YORK, NY.- The Morgan Library & Museum is presenting Uncommon Denominator, a sequence-based exhibition in which interdisciplinary artist Nina Katchadourian combines pieces from the Morgan’s collection with her own artworks and objects of familial significance. On view through May 28th, 2023, it is the third in an ongoing series of exhibitions the Morgan’s Photography Department has created in collaboration with a living artist.

Katchadourian began working on the exhibition in 2020 with Joel Smith, the Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head of Photography at the Morgan. As a way of discovering the collection via those who know it intimately, she arranged “show and-tells” with members of fifteen departments that closely engage with the collections. Over a period of five months, Katchadourian invited each staff member to participate in one-on-one, hour-long discussions about a collection object of special relevance to them. Some of these staff selections are included in the exhibition, adding to the chemistry that the artist’s “uncommon denominators” explore.

The exhibition is sequenced so that a diverse range of objects variously amplify, contradict, or comment upon one another. Katchadourian treated the Morgan as a living resource and applied an expansive definition of its “collections”. While passing through a hallway in the conservation department, for example, the artist came across a case of retired leather-working tools that struck her as “an encoded alphabet'' or “pre-historic emoticons”. Relocated to the exhibition, they are situated adjacent to Jessica Wynne’s near-life-size photograph of a Columbia University mathematician’s chalkboard. The scholar’s linear diagrams are in turn echoed by motifs in an embroidery sampler made by Lucy Katchadourian, the artist’s “third, bonus grandmother,” during her early years in an orphanage for Armenian genocide survivors.

Uncommon Denominator features the newest installment in Katchadourian’s ongoing “Sorted Books” project, which she began in 1993. To create the twenty-four photographs in the new series, titled Look Who’s Talking, the artist pulled volumes from the Morgan’s Carter Burden Collection of American Literature––the largest library collection she has worked with as part of the project––and arranged their spines into statements, poems, commentary, and narratives.

Featuring titles such as Battle of Angels by Tennessee Williams and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, these clusters at once reflect the breadth of the collection and exemplify Katchadourian’s instinct for creative recombination. Sometimes three book titles form a terse phrase; other clusters use as many as ten stacked books to tell a story.

Beginning and ending with the artist’s longstanding absorption with geography and mapmaking, Uncommon Denominator introduces viewers to recurring motifs that reward careful attention. Among the loose themes that bridge the interests of the artist, and the holdings of the Morgan are record-keeping, repairs, swarms, plants, skeletons, abstract and literal depictions of the body, handshakes, and animals.




Among highlights of Katchadourian’s work are Prince Charming, 2015, Giant Redwood, 2012, and Topiary, 2012, digital chromogenic prints from her ongoing project “Seat Assignment,” which began in 2010. The photographs, videos, and sound works in the series were all made on commercial airline flights using only a smartphone, and exemplify the artist’s deft approach to improvising with found materials in settings that seem unlikely for art-making.

“One of the operative questions for me throughout this project has been ‘What IS in the Morgan’s collection?” said Katchadourian. “I was surprised, time and time again, at what I found. Part of my goal has been to shed light on these discoveries, as well as bringing the viewer along on some of the ‘behind the scenes’ moments I was fortunate to have access to.”

Noteworthy objects from the Morgan’s collection include a delicate figure drawing by Antoine Watteau, a Mesopotamian cylinder seal from 3400-3000 BC, the diary of teenage J.P. Morgan, and an intricate ink drawing of a crowd made by a Netherlandish follower of Hieronymus Bosch ca. 1510-1540.

Director, Colin B. Bailey, commented, “As friends of the Morgan know, the institution is lively, active, and in constant growth. It has been a special pleasure to see Nina Katchadourian engage the energy and the expertise of staff members in her immersion in the collection.

Newcomers and longtime visitors alike will find much to delight and surprise them in the fruits of this collaboration.”

“The challenge, and the reward, of working with Nina Katchadourian was that she takes an interest in everything, and wants to connect everything,” said curator Joel Smith. “Even when we agreed that we’d found something too great to leave out of the mix, our work had only begun; the real personality of the show lies in the way these wonderful things are put into play with each other.”

Katchadourian’s commentary appears throughout the gallery and the exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue featuring a conversation between the artist and curator.

Following its opening, a series of public programs will offer viewers the opportunity to engage with the artist’s imaginative logic An audioguide narrated by the artist is provided via the Bloomberg Connects mobile app.