Curator, art professor, and former museum director and gallery owner, Sue Spaid contextualizes the work of David Kaiser, Hannah Dewhirst, and Ingrid A Schmidt within a larger contemporary art dialogue. Spaid connects these three Lexington-based artists, whose work is currently featured in the exhibition DOPA MINE, to an expansive legacy of artists, ideas, and art histories.

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Sue Spaid, PhD, has been active in the art world as a collector, curator, art writer, university lecturer, and museum director since 1984. Currently the co-editor of Aesthetic Investigations, Spaid’s forthcoming monograph is Making Values Explicit. The author of The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice: Between Work and World (2020) and five books on art and ecology, she teaches philosophy at Northern Kentucky University and contemporary art history at the University of Cincinnati.

She served as the Executive Director at the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore (2010-2012); Curator at the Abington Art Center and Sculpture Park, Jenkinstown (2007-2009); and Curator at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (1999‒2002). From 1990‒95, she ran Sue Spaid Fine Art, a Los Angeles gallery that launched dozens of artists’ careers.

As an independent curator, she has organized 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” (2005‒06), she traveled via car to thirty-eight states presenting “The Gist of Isness” along the way.