Brief Bio

 

Spaid's most recent exhibition is "Ecovention Europe: Art to Transform Ecologies, 1957-2017," a sixty-year survey of artists' ecological efforts throughout Europe, accompanied by a book of the same name, published by Hedendaagse Kunst De Domijnen. In 2013, her traveling exhibition “Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses, and Abandoned Lots,” funded by an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award, concluded its tour at the American University Museum and Arlington Arts Center. While Executive Director at the Contemporary Museum, Spaid co-launched "Baltimore Liste," in support of younger artists and galleries, and wrote A Field Guide to Patricia Johanson’s Works: Proposed, Built, Published and Collected to accompany a touring retrospective. 

A regular contributor to H Art, she is a former member of the artUS Contributors Board. Between 1997 and 2010, she published 54 articles in this LA art publication and 12 in its predecessor ArtText. While Curator at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (1999-2002), she authored the book Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies that accompanied the 2002 exhibition she co-curated with Amy Lipton. In addition to having written three books on eco-art, she has published over 60 essays in exhibition catalogs or take-away brochures.  

As an independent curator, she has organized well over 50 exhibitions for artist-run spaces, university galleries, commercial galleries and museums such as Santa Monica Museum of Art, Armory Center for the Arts, SPACES and the Abington Art Center and Sculpture Park. She has also served as curator of both the Bellevue Art Museum's "Pacific Northwest Annual" (2001) and the Mississippi Museum of Art's Mississippi Invitational (2006). During her “Yes Brainer Tour” (2005-2006), she traveled via car to 38 states presenting “The Gist of Isness” along the way. From 1990-1995, she ran Sue Spaid Fine Art, a scrappy Los Angeles gallery that launched dozens of local artists’ careers.