Laura Raicovich is a New York City based writer and curator. Her book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest (Verso 2021) addresses the ways in which museums and cultural institutions can become better spaces for more people. She recently co-founded The Francis Kite Club, an East Village NYC bar and collectively built space created for sociality, leisure, collaboration, debate, conversation, and play. She is curator and editor of Protodispatch, a monthly digital publication featuring artists’ reflections on the life conditions that necessitate their work. Raicovich is also working on a research initiative and book titled The 31 Women which centers on the 1943 exhibition by the same name, organized by Peggy Guggenheim at her Art of this Century gallery. And, with Carin Kuoni, she has edited a collection of essays, poetry, and art contributions titled Studies Into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech, which grew out of a year of regular public seminars on the subject organized at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
Raicovich has served as interim director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, a museum devoted to queer art and artists, and is the recipient of both the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship and the inaugural Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators at Hyperallergic.
Until early 2018, she served as President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum where she oversaw an inviting and vital commons for art, ideas, and engagement. That same year, she co-curated Mel Chin: All Over the Place (with Manon Slome and No Longer Empty), the first major presentation in New York City of artist Mel Chin in more than 20 years, which occupied the entire Queens Museum and multiple public sites in the city.
While at the Queens Museum, Raicovich oversaw a range of exhibitions, such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, a groundbreaking career survey of her work; Hey! Ho! Let's Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk, an exploration of the band's punk ethics of resistance and roots in Queens; William Gropper: Bearing Witness, whose powerful political drawings made decades ago eerily reflect the issues of the day; and commissioned projects by noted artists Mickalene Thomas, Mariam Ghani, and Duke Riley.
Prior to the Queens Museum, Raicovich inaugurated Creative Time’s Global Initiatives, where she expanded the organization’s international work; launched Creative Time Reports, a media initiative featuring artists’ perspectives on world news and events; and directed the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference on art and social justice. She arrived there after a decade at Dia Art Foundation, where she served as deputy director and was a key member of the senior team during a period of transformation for the institution that included the opening of Dia:Beacon. She was instrumental in creating and implementing the preservation strategies of Dia’s iconic site-specific artworks in the American West, Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970). Prior to that, she worked at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Public Art Fund, and New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation.
Raicovich lectures internationally and has organized numerous talks and programs, including the two collaborations on series of public seminars with Carin Kuoni at The New School’s Vera List Center for Arts and Politics: the 2018-19 Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies into Darkness, conceived in collaboration with artist Amar Kanwar, and the 2014-15 seminar series that addressed the challenges artists contend with in a globalized world, "Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production" (OR Books, 2017). She is also the author of "At the Lightning Field" (Coffee House Press, 2017) and "A Diary of Mysterious Difficulties" (Publication Studio, 2014).
She graduated from Swarthmore College and holds a Master’s Degree in Liberal Studies from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
Photo: Michael Angelo
Read what the press has to say about Laura: