A Conversation on Norman Zammitt

Karma presents a conversation between Cecilia Alemani, Jeremy Frey, and Laura Whitcomb on the occasion of Norman Zammitt, A Degree of Light at 549 West 26th Street, New York.

Cecilia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York City. Since 2011, she has been the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, the public art program presented by the High Line in New York City. She also curated the 12th SITE Santa Fe International which opened in June 2025. From 2020 to 2022, she served as artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale, where she curated the acclaimed exhibition The Milk of Dreams, which was visited by over 800,000 visitors. In recent years, she has curated several exhibitions, including Willem de Kooning - Endless Painting (May 2025) and Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self (September 2023), the first American retrospective of Japanese painter Tetsuya Ishida, both at Gagosian Gallery in New York; Making Their Mark, the first public presentation of the Shah Garg Collection, a major exhibition showcasing the works of more than 80 of the most significant women artists from the last eight decades (548 West 22nd Street, New York, 2023; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2024; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St Louis, 2025); Anu Põder: Space for My Body, the first solo exhibition presented outside Estonia of works by Anu Põder, at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland (2024). She also served as artistic director of the inaugural edition of Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires in 2018 and was the curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Over the past twenty years, Alemani has developed an expertise in commissioning and producing ambitious artworks for the public space and unusual sites.

Jeremy Frey is one of the foremost Passamaquoddy craftspeople of his generation. A descendant of a long line of Indigenous weavers, Frey learned traditional Wabanaki methods from his mother and by apprenticing at the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. Woven from natural materials that the artist himself forages, such as sweetgrass and wood from black ash trees, Frey’s vessels are characterized by subtle forms, delicately layered colors, and elaborate weaves. Building on and experimenting with the material histories of Wabanaki basketry, his work is also in dialogue with contemporary sculpture’s emphasis on materiality, form, and variation within repetition. To create his basket relief prints, Frey has developed a novel form of flat weaving that can be run repeatedly through a printing press, preserving and sharing his techniques without impacting the stock of his rare materials. Frey lives in Maine.

Laura Whitcomb is a Surrealism scholar and founding director of Label Curatorial, recognized for illuminating overlooked West Coast artists and the experimental ecosystems they forged across music, poetry, dance, performance, and film. As curatorial director of the Dilexi Retrospective (2019), she foregrounded the gallery’s project as the locus where Surrealist influence and funk-art-inflected science fiction first catalyzed. Her forthcoming book, Bay Area Artist and Poet-Run Galleries, 1949–1965 (D.A.P., 2026), traces a regional avant-garde animated by hermetic approaches, activist impulses, and experimentation with form highlighting Hilaire Hilel as a foundational innovator in immersive color practice whose work anticipates the chromatic investigations of Zammitt. In 2014, she curated the official reopening of the Brand Library & Art Center with a Light and Space exhibition featuring Larry Bell, Peter Alexander, and Laddie John Dill. Her 2022 exhibition Luminaries of Light and Space at LAX Airport—developed in partnership with dublab—presented The Brand-shown artists along with Robert Irwin, De Wain Valentine, Fred Eversley, Helen Pashgian, Gisela Colón, and Hap Tivey. Her latest publication, Paulina Peavy: Etherian Channeler (D.A.P, 2023), edited by adjunct LACMA curator Dr. Ilene Susan Fort, explores the artist’s early collaborations with Synchromists Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, pioneers in exploring new modalities of light and color tensions through abstraction.She participated in Karma’s 2023 dialogue with LACMA senior curator Carol S. Eliel and Gisela Colón centering Norman Zammitt’s Band Paintings and the evolving legacy of West Coast color innovation.

These programs are free, but space is limited. RSVP is essential.

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