South Gallery
November 7 - December 20, 2025
BUZZ SPECTOR
Recto | Verso
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Buzz Spector is an American artist, writer, and educator whose work investigates the relationships between public history, individual memory, and perception. He is best known for his sculptural and conceptual use of books—both as subject and object—employing stacking, tearing, and reconfiguration to explore how meaning is constructed, contained, and transformed through the materiality of language.
Spector’s solo museum exhibitions include the Art Institute of Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Huntington Museum of Art (West Virginia), Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), Qian Juntao Museum (Jiaxing, China), Saint Louis Art Museum, and, most recently, the Rockford Art Museum (Illinois). His work has also been featured in numerous group and thematic exhibitions across the United States and abroad and is represented in more than fifty museum collections. In addition to his visual practice, Spector has written extensively on contemporary art and culture for publications such as Artforum, American Craft, Brooklyn Rail, Art on Paper, Exposure, and New Art Examiner. He is the author of The Book Maker’s Desire (Umbrella Editions, 1994) and Buzz Words (Sara Ranchouse Publishing, 2012) and has contributed essays to many exhibition catalogues. His experimental writing has appeared in journals including Benzene, Café Solo, Posit, and River Styx. A central figure in the intersection of art and writing, Spector co-founded WhiteWalls: a magazine of writings by artists in Chicago in 1978 and served as its editor until 1987. From 2013 to 2025, he was art editor of december, the St. Louis–based magazine of literature and art. Spector holds degrees in art and design from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and the University of Chicago. He lives and works in the Hudson Valley of New York, continuing to shape contemporary dialogues around books, memory, and the visual language of text.. |
