NEW YORK, NY.- Richard Armstrong, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, announced last night that Jennifer Stockman, President of the Board of Trustees, and her husband, David Stockman, have endowed the position of Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Deputy Director and Chief Curator Nancy Spector, who joined the Guggenheim in 1989, will be the first Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator.

“I am delighted to announce Nancy Spector’s appointment as the first Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator,” stated Mr. Armstrong, in making the announcement. “With foresight and innovation, Nancy has organized many of the most compelling and important exhibitions of contemporary art, not just at the Guggenheim, but anywhere. With Jennifer and David Stockman’s endowment of this position, Nancy will carry on her groundbreaking and scholarly work and continue to play a major role in the direction of the Guggenheim Museum. “Nancy Spector is the preeminent curator of contemporary art who has come to be known for her expectation-shattering installations,” said Jennifer Stockman, who joined the Board of Trustees of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 2002 and was elected its President in 2005. “David and I are thrilled to endow her position so her precedent-setting work can continue.” Ms. Spector noted, “To be associated with Jennifer and David Stockman is a great honor. The museum is extraordinarily fortunate to have their untiring support, engendered no doubt by their empathetic and enthusiastic engagement with the arts. They are especially impassioned about the creative process and Jennifer, in particular, has been such a strong and vocal advocate for our curators. Her support for our most radical exhibition ideas and collection-building initiatives means so much to the staff. It is very touching that David and Jennifer Stockman have chosen to endow the position of Chief Curator, which signals a willingness to champion the kind of conceptual risk-taking for which we are best known.”

Ms. Spector will continue to work closely with Mr. Armstrong on the Foundation’s global strategy and the museum’s exhibition program. She is also responsible for organizing contemporary exhibitions and the growth of the permanent collection, as well as overseeing the institution’s primary acquisition councils, the Collections Council and the International Director’s Council.

Exhibitions that Ms. Spector has organized at the Guggenheim include Rebecca Horn: The Inferno-Paradiso Switch (1992, with Germano Celant); Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1995); Robert Rauschenberg: Performance (1997); Postmedia: Conceptual Photography from the Guggenheim Museum Collection (2000); Moving Pictures: Contemporary Photography and Video from the Guggenheim Museum Collections (2002); Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle (2002-2003); Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present (2004); Marina Abramovic: Seven Easy Pieces (2005); Richard Prince (2007); Louise Bourgeois (2008); theanyspacewhatever (2008); Tino Sehgal (2010); and Maurizio Cattelan: All (2011).

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). In addition to her position at the Guggenheim, 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. She was Adjunct Curator of the 1997 Venice Biennale and co-organizer of the first Berlin Biennale in 1998. She has contributed to numerous books on contemporary visual culture with essays on artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Luc Tuymans, Douglas Gordon, and Marina Abramovic. In 2007 she was the U.S. Commissioner for the Venice Biennale, where she presented an exhibition of work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. She is a recipient of the Peter Norton Family Foundation Curators Award (1993) and a Cartier Foundation Grant (1992). Five of her exhibitions at the Guggenheim have won International Art Critics Association Awards. Ms. Spector received her Masters Degree in Art History from the Clark Art Institute, Williams College, attended the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and completed her MPhil at the City University of New York, Graduate Center.