A Scheme to Annihilate Magnificent Distances

Carolee Thea is a New York City-based artist, writer, curator, and art critic. In her three decades as a multimedia artist, her work was exhibited across the country in galleries, museums, art centres, sculpture gardens, and universities. In the late 1960s, she entered the New York art world and received recognition for her contributions to the development of contemporary art and to the growing feminist movement. Her work spanned sculpture, film, photography, performance, and public earthworks, breaking with tradition by blurring formal conventions and precipitating urgent conversations about gender, authorship, and corporeality. In the second half of her career, Ms. Thea transitioned to art writing, ultimately writing three books of interviews with some of the most significant curators in the world: Foci: Interviews with Ten International Curators (2001), On Curating (2006), and On Curating 2 (2016). Her writing has been featured in such publications as Artnet, ArtAsiaPacific, NYArts Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, among others, and she served on the editorial board of the fifth issue of Heresies. She has taught at Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Art, and the College of New Rochelle, among others. Thea attended Skidmore College and Columbia University, and in 1976, she earned her MA from Hunter College, City University of New York. Her books continue to be relevant to contemporary debates around globalization and the role of the international curatorial apparatus.