Advisor’s Lens with Katherine Gass Stowe
Advisor’s Lens 🔍
Where we highlight our members’ art historical insights and curatorial expertise.
Advisor’s Lens is an ongoing series that shines a light on APAA members and the expertise they bring to their work—through their art historical knowledge, curatorial experience, and personal connections within the art world.
In this feature, we're spotlighting Katherine Gass Stowe, founder and chief curator of James Company Contemporary Art Projects LLC, a curatorial firm that creates and manages contemporary art collections with a strong focus on community building and connecting contemporary art to organizational missions. Her firm is currently working in collaboration with Nonstop-Enterprises on a public art program for a landmarked historic building in Chelsea, New York, which will launch in 2026.
”Wendy White’s work impressed me the first time I saw it in 2021 at The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Vermont. It was a site-specific installation included in Expedition, a group exhibition curated by the painter John Newsom, and it was the standout piece. Double Rainbow (Multiple Levels) was impressively backlit against tall windows overlooking the Connecticut River and featured a seating structure built around a plywood planter filled with palms. Reminiscent of train terminal seating c. the 1970s, it had a mobile with rainbows and clouds painted in flat black hanging above seating that was covered in worn, bleached and patched denim, with a pale-yellow rug underneath and bright yellow vinyl underneath that, spilling down the marble museum stairs. There were also half smoked Camel cigarettes casually left in certain spots around the piece. The Brattleboro Museum is housed a landmarked train station, so there was that connection, but the installation itself was so compelling because it elicited memories of suburban youth (smoking in small train stations) but also a form of nostalgia that wasn’t based on my personal experience at all. Or so I thought. It stayed with me.
White uses a vocabulary of visual language lifted from various pockets of American popular culture such as digital communication, brand logos, sports, NASCAR, neon signage, punk, and surfing to name a few. Carefully considering context, she extracts random parts to create a new cohesive whole. Common and ubiquitous symbols – rainbows, hearts, peace signs, clouds, tears – are enlarged, bent, sometimes even studded, and all treated formally. Technically, one can see the call backs to male-dominated conventions in art history, like her use of photography, silk screen and shaped canvases by Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and Richard Pettibone (I’m thinking of the combines here); her employment of text and spray gun to elicit depth and atmosphere in her work bring up Ed Ruscha; and her mobiles, with their flat painted surfaces and hearty metal shapes that homage, sometimes literally, the work of Alexander Calder.”
Her work is in the public collections of Detroit Institute of the Arts, Detroit, MI; The High Museum, Atlanta, GA; RISD Art Museum, Providence, RI; Museum Goch, Goch, Germany; Bank of America, New York, NY; Kranzberg Art Foundation, St. Louis, MO; Saks Fifth Avenue, New York, NY; Taguchi Art Collection, Tokyo, Japan; UK Art Museum, Lexington, KY; Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Atlanta, GA; Savannah College of Art & Design, Savannah, GA and Lacoste, France; UBS Art Collection, New York, NY; Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield, OH; Red Bull Art Collection; The Shinola Hotel, Detroit, MI; and ARCO Foundation, Madrid, Spain. Solo exhibitions include Museum Goch, Germany (2021), Gaa Gallery, New York, NY and Provincetown, MA; Kaikai Kiki, Tokyo; Leo Koenig Inc., New York; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; COUNTY, Palm Beach; Denny Dimin Gallery, New York; David Castillo, Miami; Eric Firestone Gallery, New York; and Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago.
White will be featured in a solo presentation at Gaa Gallery (Booth 505B) at The Independent, May 8–11 at Spring Studios, New York.
Browse through a behind the scenes tour of White’s studio and a few public works.
