Join SVMoA and Buzz Spector, internationally recognized artist, writer, critic, and Emeritus Professor of Art at Washington University in St. Louis, for a talk exploring the publications, ideas, and language-based artistic practices that shaped the art of the 1960s and 1970s, drawing connections to Circa 1971, the artists in the exhibition, and the longstanding dialogue between avant-garde literature and visual art.
Buzz Spector is an American artist, writer, and educator whose work explores the relationships between public history, individual memory, and perception. Best known for his sculptural and conceptual use of books, he employs stacking, tearing, and reconfiguration to examine how meaning is constructed and transformed through the materiality of language.
His solo museum exhibitions include the Art Institute of Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Huntington Museum of Art, Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), Qian Juntao Museum (China), Saint Louis Art Museum, and most recently the Rockford Art Museum. His work has also appeared in numerous group exhibitions and is represented in more than fifty museum collections. Spector has written extensively on contemporary art for publications including Artforum, American Craft, Brooklyn Rail, Art on Paper, Exposure, and New Art Examiner. He is the author of The Book Maker's Desire (1994) and Buzz Words (2012), and his experimental writing has appeared in journals such as Benzene, Café Solo, Posit, and River Styx.
A leading figure at the intersection of art and writing, Spector co-founded WhiteWalls, a magazine of artists' writings, in 1978 and served as its editor until 1987. From 2013 to 2025, he was art editor of december, the St. Louis–based literary magazine. He holds degrees from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and the University of Chicago and lives and works in New York's Hudson Valley.
