Uncommon Denominator: Nina Katchadourian at the Morgan

“Art is a good place to practice the craft of looking and listening closely. Through my work, I hope to infect people with a certain rigorous attentiveness.” —Nina Katchadourian

Uncommon Denominator: Nina Katchadourian at the Morgan was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name, in which the artist freely mixed artworks and objects from the Morgan Library & Museum’s famed collections, from her own career, and from her personal and family history.

The book features a conversation between the artist and Joel Smith, the museum’s Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, in which they discuss the creation of the exhibition and Katchadourian’s larger multimedia practice. It also incorporates an exhibition checklist and illustrations of select objects, including new photographs in the artist’s ongoing “Sorted Books” project.

Like the exhibition itself, the book presents images in a sequence that obeys Katchadourian’s expansive, imaginative logic, exploring themes such as cartography, celestial events, rearrangement, concealment, record-keeping, handshakes, plants, animals, and perpetual recurrence. The pairings and ordering of images in the catalogue are distinct from that of the exhibition, however, revealing new affinities and discoveries with each closer look.

Published by the Morgan Library & Museum

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