Cathleen Chaffee
Dr. Cathleen Chaffee joined the Albright-Knox in January 2014 and has been Chief Curator since September 2017.
At the Albright-Knox, Chaffee is currently preparing touring retrospective exhibitions dedicated to Stanley Whitney (2023/4) and to Marisol (Venezuelan and American, born France, 1930–2016) (2023/4). She has curated exhibitions and authored accompanying publications for projects including Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective (2018), Joe Bradley (2017), Shade: Clyfford Still / Mark Bradford (2016), Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Ecologies of Drama (2015), and Overtime: The Art of Work (2015), among others. She co-curated Anthony McCall: Dark Rooms, Solid Light (2019), Looking at Tomorrow: Light and Language from The Panza Collection, 1967–1990 (2016), Screen Play: Life in an Animated World (2015), and Erin Shirreff (2016).
Chaffee’s books and essays have addressed the work of Bas Jan Ader, Richard Artschwager, Carol Bove, Mark Bradford, Marcel Broodthaers, Tony Conrad, Hanne Darboven, Gabriel Kuri, Eric N. Mack, and Joëlle Tuerlinckx, among many others. Her writing has been published in magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, Contemporary, Mousse, and Manifesta Journal. Chaffee has lectured widely on contemporary art and artists as well as topics including language and duration in minimal and conceptual art, the representation of labor in post-war art, artist-curated exhibitions, and the home and “home-like” in art after Duchamp.
Chaffee was Horace W. Goldsmith Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery from 2010 to 2014 and previously held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Chaffee received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and was awarded a 2008 Fulbright Fellowship to Belgium to complete research for her dissertation, Décors: Marcel Broodthaers’s Late Exhibition Practice 1974–75. She received her master’s degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. In 2018 Chaffee was the VIA Art Fund’s Curatorial Fellow.
