Carolee Thea is a New York City artist, writer, curator, and art critic. In her three decades as a full-time multimedia artist, Thea’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries, museums, art centers, sculpture gardens, universities across the country, and several land-based site sculptures.

Her work has been shown extensively throughout N.Y.C., East Hampton, and Long Island. Thea summered and created art in East Hampton for 30 years and considered the area her second home.

Thea began showing at local N.Y.C. galleries and received instant recognition for her contributions to her art and the feminist movement. She co-founded the National Organization for Women in the Arts in Westchester County. In 1980, she organized artists in East Hampton to create banners for the famous Equal Rights Amendment March-In today, known as the “Year of the Woman.” The East Hampton Star of 1980 has a historical record of her involvement in the movement Women Talk to Women.

Thea’s art was first reviewed in 1970’s Artforum, followed by The New York Times by Peter Schjedahl in 1980, John Russell in 1984, William Zimmer in 1985, Helen Harrison in 1987, and Phyllis Braff in 1991 and 1992. Additionally, reviews of her artworks have appeared in Village Voice, East Hampton Star, South Hampton Press, Miami News, Arts Magazine, Art World, and more.

Parallel to making art, in 1976, she began writing art criticism and served on the editorial board of Heresies V, a Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. Her many articles, reviews, and interviews have been published in national and international journals, magazines, and newspapers, including Parkett, artforum.com, Heresies, Artnet, BOMB, ArtAsiaPacific, The Brooklyn Rail and Atlantica, where she also served as the English editor for the 45th issue. She has been a contributing editor at ArtAsiaPacific and Sculpture Magazine.

She has been praised for her minimalist, feminist, and otherwise culturally and environmentally significant approaches to paintings, sculptures, installations, and performances, and she was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990. Her solo shows at The Queens Museum and Hofstra University were favorably reviewed. In 1988, she received an award from the Athena Foundation for her work in the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York, and from 1977-79, she was a C.A.P.S. finalist. From figures in mythic and historical positions to recorded performances, amongst the transient land/earth-based meditations of an American woman – she remains formally and conceptually relevant to contemporary artmaking.

Ms. Thea earned a B.A. in International Relations from Columbia University, where she minored in the study of African Art under the advisement of field expert Doug Fraser. In the ’70s, she earned her M.A. from Hunter College, where she studied with Robert Morris, Robert Barry, and Leo Steinberg (Leo published her work), and they remained a lifelong friend.

As a curator, Thea worked with the Architectural Institute of America, the Canal Street Billboard Projects, Skidmore College Gallery, and a Gallery in N.Y.C. Thea was the curatorial assistant and coordinator for the International curator Amnon Barzel for the exhibition Remote Connections at the Graz Museum in Austria, Art Focus in Jerusalem and Denmark in 1996-97. In the 1980s, she was a curatorial advisor to Artists Representing Environmental Art. In 2004, she was invited to the American Academy in Rome as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar.

Combining an astute knowledge of art history, contemporary art, and especially global culture, Thea began or felt better served to investigate the Curatorial Process, and she wrote three important books of Interviews with the most important International Curators in the world. Her first book, Foci, was published in 2001 by Apexart Curatorial Program, and D.A.P. published the last two books in 2006-2016. Interviews with 10 International Curators and On Curating 2/ Paradigm Shifts has been translated into several languages and is today employed in countless University programs.

Thea received funding for her books from Artspire (N.Y.F.A.) in 2012, The Mercosul Biennial Foundation in 2011, the Gwangju Biennale Foundation in 2002, and the Istanbul Biennial Foundation in 2003, 2006, and 2009. While in Istanbul, the Foundation supported her travel to other parts of Turkey (Dyabakar) for research, talks, and education. Thea’s archive, including her original interviews with curators, was acquired in December 2012 by the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies and the Hessel Museum of Art’s Library and Archives. In 2017, Thea was selected as the Gund Visiting Curator at Hunter CUNY.

A well-traveled artist/writer, Thea dedicates most of her time today to writing her memoir. Her last artwork, Sabine Woman (1993), was shown in a group show in 2018, The U-Heroic-Act, and her work was reviewed most favorably in the New York Times and ten other publications.