Image: Portrait of Emma’s pram surrounded by ‘E’ paintings made by John Nixon, 1996.
The Clock Wife
October 25, 2025 – January 25, 2026
MARJA BLOEM with SETH SIEGELAUB
SUE CRAMER and EMMA NIXON with JOHN NIXON
JUF (BEA ORTEGA BOTAS and LETO YBARRA) with FRAN HERNDON and friends
VANITA and JOHANNA MONK
Exhibition design by MAUD VERVENNE
Guest Writer: DODIE BELLAMY
Accumulating over three months, The Clock Wife is an exhibition that focuses on artist estate management by presenting four estates through the eyes of the women overseeing them: Marja Bloem presenting her partner Seth Siegelaub; Sue Cramer and Emma Nixon presenting husband and father John Nixon; Johanna Monk presenting her beloved Vanita Monk; and Juf (Bea Ortega Botas and Leto Ybarra) presenting their peer Fran Herndon. [1] At the core of the exhibition is the conflation of administrative and emotional labour inherent to this line of work. Yet an exhibition built around an acknowledgement of the invisibility of certain forms of labour—and an attempt to centre them in turn—has a paradox at heart: how do you make visible that which is not seen?
While still acknowledging the artists around whom each of the estates revolve, The Clock Wife spotlights the work of the executors themselves. In order to do so, each executor has been asked to state a current need of the estate, one that, if filled, would better equip her to do the work at hand. In turn, the exhibition budget, as well as aspects of the broader institutional budget that pertain to some of the needs—such as the advertising budget, the public program budget and the ‘office costs’ budget—has been redistributed towards tending to them.
Each of the executors are at different points in the establishment of the estates as well as in their journeys with the grief that unfolds alongside this work: some have been doing it for decades, others picked it up unexpectedly only recently, learning and healing all wrapped up in one. Additionally, the social and familial relations that inform each of the bonds vary, with each pushing at normative understandings of artistic legacy in their own way. Naturally, then, the needs of each estate are also different: Sue and Emma strive for more visibility for John Nixon’s practice, Marja struggles with digitisation requests and seeks an assistant skilled in this area. In another case, Bea and Leto desire more scholarship on Fran Herndon’s work, while Johanna simply needs money to buy her time to actually get everything in order. Yet in the conversations that determined these needs, and despite the variations in practice and contexts, all the estates had two overarching things in common: 1. a desire to meet others doing this work in order to learn, and 2. further visibility for the practices. Or, as Johanna concisely put it, ‘Simply, a platform’. With this in mind, The Clock Wife revolves around a central platform system that draws on the invisible histories of the space of A Tale of A Tub—a former washhouse and site of gendered labour itself—and which acts as an intervention into the architecture. Developed by designer Maud Vervenne, the platforms are both metaphor and actual stage, upon which a series of talks, performances and informal meetings will take place throughout the exhibition.
Felt throughout the conversations that informed the making of The Clock Wife is the material and administrative weight of loss. This is not just as physical reality—apartments stacked to the brim with storage boxes full of possessions too achy to part with, paintings dispersed in home and garages all over the world, begging to be catalogued—but also a financial one—said artworks needing to be sold in order for executors to pay tax on the ones that remain, foundations requiring legal establishment, so on and so forth. And with all this in mind, much of this daily work is done to learn to live with the loss, or, as Marja Bloem said, ‘to keep Seth alive’. Beyond art historical legacies and histories of gendered labour more broadly speaking, in the marginal spaces of the emotionally administrative—the scribbled inscriptions housed in archival systems so personally felt that they refuse objective organisation—there is a lot to be learned from and to acknowledge in the commitment of estate managers. This exhibition is an attempt to begin that process.
[1] Given the personal nature of this project, this footnote demands an uncharacteristic insertion of the ‘I’ into the press release form: During a gallery visit a number of years ago, I enquired about the name of the estate executor of Vit Cimbura, a Czech post-modern designer most known for the kitschy experimental clocks he made in the later years of his life. The person I asked wasn’t sure of the name and proceeded to yell out to his colleague at the gallery, ‘What’s the name of the clock wife?’ As evidenced by the nickname, Cimbura’s widow had looked after his work since his passing, and the label, however descriptive, betrayed a certain historical attitude toward the position of both the widow and the estate executor: that being someone defined by her relationship to (the work of) another. This was one of a number of instances that got me thinking about the designation of women to anonymous administrative roles within the narratives of artistic legacy and now serves as the anecdote from which this exhibition got its name.
Biographies
MARJA BLOEM (1944, the Netherlands) is an art historian and former curator of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, where she specialised in art since the 1960s. She is now active as exhibition maker, author and director of the Egress Foundation, which takes care of the legacy of Seth Siegelaub. She was a board member of Kunstverein, Amsterdam, and an advisor of the Mondriaan Fonds.
SETH SIEGELAUB (1941–2013) played a vital role in the emergence of Conceptual Art. He developed new models for exhibiting art, among which the Xerox Book, which refigured the book as exhibition space. Siegelaub was also involved in the politics of art as shown by the publication of How to Read Donald Duck in the Third World and the ‘Artist’s Contract’, which sought to protect the artist’s moral and economic rights. In the 1980 he turned his interest to the social and economic history of textiles, building an enormous collection.
SUE CRAMER, based in Narrm (Melbourne), is an independent curator, writer and Director of the John Nixon Estate. She has held curatorial roles in several Australian museums and galleries. Her major exhibitions include Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gadigal (Sydney), 2021–22, and the forthcoming John Nixon: Song of the Earth 1968–2020 at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2025–26.
EMMA NIXON is Assistant Curator at TarraWarra Museum of Art in Victoria, Australia. She completed a Bachelor of Art History and Curating at Monash University, and her peer-reviewed Honours thesis ‘Friendship as a Curatorial Methodology’ was published in Findings Journal. She co-curated John Nixon—Four Decades, Five Hundred Prints at Geelong Gallery in 2023 and A Fictional Retrospective: Gertrude’s First Decade 1985–1995 at Gertrude Contemporary in 2025.
Australian artist JOHN NIXON (1949–2020) created abstract art for over five decades, driven by experimentation and engagement with radical modernism: ‘Minimalism, the Monochrome, Non-Objectivity and Konstruction’. An influential and collaborative figure, he exhibited widely in Australia, Europe and New York. While painting—explored through his Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW)—was central, his multidisciplinary practice encompassed printmaking, theatre, music and publishing.
JUF is a curatorial and research project that revolves around contemporary art and poetry, directed by Bea Ortega Botas and Leto Ybarra, and now based between New York and Madrid. Juf’s work has recently been shown at Et. al (San Francisco), 99CANAL (New York), Judson Memorial Church (New York), Gasworks (London), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), NYU Tisch School of the Arts (New York), Hangar (Barcelona) and TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Madrid). Juf is currently investigating the work of the artist Fran Herndon, carrying out an inventory of her oeuvre, and contributing to the establishment of her estate.
FRAN HERNDON (1926–2020) worked through a variety of media and helped define the San Francisco Renaissance along with painters and poets such as Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer and Jess or Robert Duncan. In 1959, Herndon became the art editor of the poetry/art magazine J, often credited as the first journal of the ‘mimeo revolution’, and in the following years she showed at the experimental ‘poets’ galleries’ of the period. Today, new interest in her work connects it with urgent aesthetic and political conversations within contemporary art.
VANITA and JOHANNA MONK made and performed art, music and literature together for thirty-five years until Vanita’s death in 2024. Johanna now continues this collaboration beyond the boundary of life, her practice existing on a continuum from past to future, between estate curation and new works rooted in a personal mythology of love, trauma, healing, violence, transformation, lust, enlightenment and death.
DODIE BELLAMY is a novelist, poet, and essayist. Key to her work is a commitment to narrative experimentation, through which she challenges the distinctions between fiction, essay and poetry with a focus on feminism, sexuality, cultural artifacts, both high and low, and all things queer. Past titles include When the Sick Rule the World (2015), Bee Reaved (2021) and Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977–1997, edited with her late husband Kevin Killian.
MAUD VERVENNE is a designer based in Amsterdam, collaborating with artists, curators, publishers and cultural institutions. In her practice, she works at the intersection of identity development, exhibition-making and spatial design.