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Join us for a special conversation with artist Jimmy Wright and Jane Panetta, Aaron I. Fleischman Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Wright and Panetta will discuss the artist’s work in addition to Wright’s experience living in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Jimmy Wright’s important work Flowers for Ken: Sunflower Stem (1988-91) was acquired by Speed Contemporary for the museum’s permanent collection in 2022. Recently conserved, the work is now a centerpiece in the museum’s current collection installation Crosscurrents: Contemporary Art from the Speed Art Museum Collection and Beyond, where it is currently in conversation with a major work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Jimmy Wright, a Fulton, Kentucky native born in 1944 and a National Academician, received an Honorary Doctor of Arts from Southern Illinois University in 2024.

Wright has been a New York-based artist since 1974. His large Bowery studio is home to five decades of work, the most prominent of which is a series of billowing floral paintings and a drawing series that chart his engagement with the subculture of gay life on the Lower East Side before the HIV / AIDS epidemic. The collection of work marks a distinct moment in the artist’s early career, celebrating the counter-cultural scene of his generation in a formally diverse, visually potent, and pulsating portrait of a heady time. Grace Glueck’s contemporary review of the flower series, written for The New York Times, states, “These are not flowers as decoration but symbols of a deeper engagement with the vagaries of nature and the self.”

Wright’s work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Academy of Design Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Speed Art Museum, Springfield Museum of Art, Arkansas Center for the Arts, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Butler Institute for American Art, and numerous public and private international collections. He attended Murray State University on a Regents scholarship from 1963-64.  He received a B.F.A. with honors from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967 and an M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has continued his involvement in arts education at the Ox-Bow School of Art, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Southern Illinois University, and Murray State University.

JW Photographer: Benjamin Fredrickson

Jane Panetta was recently named the Aaron I. Fleischman Curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art with special interests in American and European modern and contemporary art. Prior to this, Panetta spent the past decade at the Whitney Museum of American Art as a curator and most recently, as Director of the Collection. In addition to her extensive collection work, at the Whitney Panetta organized myriad solo and group exhibitions ranging from the 2019 Whitney Biennial to solo projects with artists Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Willa Nasatir, Jennifer Packer, and Rose Simpson, among others. Panetta also worked at The Museum of Modern Art and has lectured, taught and written widely on contemporary art and sculpture, in particular, and is a member of Madison Square Park’s Public Art Consortium. Upcoming at the Met, Panetta will curate the 2025 Met Facade Commission with artist Jeffrey Gibson and is working closely with the Modern and Contemporary team on the forthcoming Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing.