Joan Simon is an independent curator, writer, and arts administrator based in Paris. As curator-at-large for the Whitney Museum of American Art (2004–2009), she organized Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926–1933 (with Brigitte Leal) in a partnership with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer, the first large-scale retrospective of cinema’s first woman director and studio owner with careers in France and the U.S. between 1896 and 1920; its catalogue was the Winner of the 2010 Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal in the Performing Arts. She was a contributor to the catalogues for Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the Measure” (Whitney, 2007) and Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT (organized by the MCA Chicago and the Beyeler Foundation, which traveled to the Whitney 2010). Simon organized Sheila Hicks: Fifty Years (with Susan Faxon) for the Addison Gallery of American Art (2010), the first retrospective of this Paris-based, American born artist, traveling in 2011 to the ICA, Philadelphia, and the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, Charlotte, North Carolina.
A former managing editor of Art in America (1974–83), Simon has published extensively on contemporary art for numerous journals, including Parkett, Art Press, and Art in America where she is a contributing editor. She is the author of Susan Rothenberg (1991), William Wegman: Funney-Strange (2006), and Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects (2006), which was named one of the Outstanding Academic Books of the year by Choice Magazine, and honored by the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts), as one of the year’s best “50 Books/50 Covers”. She has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues, including those devoted to Robert Gober, Sheila Hicks, Joan Jonas, Annette Messager, Bruce Nauman, Fred Sandback, Rosemarie Trockel, and served as general editor of the exhibition catalogue and catalogue raisonné Bruce Nauman (1994).
Emna Zghal
Dr. Irving Sandler
Max Kozloff
Oleg Grabar
Michael Duncan
Joan Simon
Holland Cotter
Elizabeth Baker