Nancy Lee Katz
Nancy Lee Katz worked as a film editor and still photographer. She then dedicated a period of twenty-five years to a private project of photographing people, mainly in the arts, whose work she respected. She kept the pictures entirely to herself, never offering them for sale, or for exhibit, or for publication, with the sole exception of a donation to Bibliothèque Nationale de France in gratitude for being able to use their facilities to research 19th Century photographs.
During the three weeks before her death, she went through the twenty boxes of prints and selected the best image of each subject, rating it good, uncertain, or bad. The images in the first two categories are being offered to museums worldwide, but not for sale, and as of August 2021, groups of photographs by this previously unknown artist have gone into the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Collection of the Supreme Court, Israel Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Canada, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art.
Between 2019 and 2024 groups of photographic portraits by Nancy Lee Katz, averaging
46, have been acquired by the photography departments of the following institutions:
Albertina Museum, Vienna
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth
Art Institute of Chicago
Baltimore Museum of Art
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (complete pantheon)
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Center for Creative Photography, Tucson
Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk
Collection of the Supreme Court, Washington
Detroit Institute of Arts
George Eastman Museum, Rochester
Harry Ransom Center, Austin
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington
Image Centre, Toronto
Israel Museum, Jerusalem (complete pantheon)
Jewish Museum, New York
Library of Congress, Washington (complete pantheon)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Magnes Collection, Berkeley (complete pantheon)
Milwaukee Art Museum
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida
Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany
National Gallery of Art, Washington
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
National Portrait Gallery, Washington
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
New Orleans Museum of Art (complete pantheon)
New York Public Library (complete pantheon)
Photo Elysée, Lausanne
Portland Art Museum, Oregon
Princeton University Art Museum
Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence
Royal Collection Trust, Windsor Castle (complete pantheon)
Seattle Art Museum
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (complete pantheon)
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
Michael S. Sachs (12 August 2021)
