ICYMI: Stacy Lynn Waddell In conversation with Catherine Morris

This event took place on 24th May 2023.

Stacy Lynn Waddell's work Goldenhot Butterfly Queen has been acquired for Bristol Museum & Art Gallery through the Valeria Napoleone XX Contemporary Art Society award, which supports the acquisition of significant works by a living female artist for a museum collection. This monumental gold leaf image brings together two figures in colonial history. Sarah Baartman (1789-1815), the so-called ‘Hottentot Venus’ and Thelma ‘Butterfly’ McQueen (1911-1995), the Hollywood actor, ‘Prissy’ from Gone with the Wind.

Catherine Morris is the Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum where, since 2009, she has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions including Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And; We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985; Judith Scott-Bound and Unbound; and Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art. She has worked on projects examining contemporary practices through historical precedents, including the museum wide Sackler Center ten-year anniversary project, The Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum. She has worked on exhibitions and curatorial projects with Beverly Buchanan, Eva Hesse, Suzanne Lacy, Marilyn Minter, Zanele Muholi, Nellie Mae Rowe, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, and Cecilia Vicuna and produced historical exhibitions such as Twice Militant: Lorraine Hansberry’s Letters to The Ladder; Newspaper Fiction: The New York Journalism of Djuna Barnes, 1913-1919; and Healing the Wounds of War: The Brooklyn Sanity Fair of 1864. Morris was a curatorial organizer for the Brooklyn Museum presentations of Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving; Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985; and Seductive Subversions: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968. Upcoming projects include It’s Pablomatic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby and Elizabeth Catlett: A Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies.