Quincey Spagnoletti
It’s a pleasure to feature Quincey Spagnoletti. I had come across her work I think at a PRC/Boston group show of photographic arts educators a while back. The work stuck with me. Recently she and I both had work in another group exhibit at Galatea fine Arts in SoWA. The 16th New England Collective. I was reminded of how interesting her pieces were. I kept coming back. Quincey is a Boston-based photographer whose multidisciplinary practice explores identity, womanhood, memory, and representation through photography, installation, and performance. Drawing from her personal history, she combines images of the body with archival photographs from her childhood to create layered narratives of selfhood and memory. Her work has been widely featured in publications including The Boston Globe, Boston Art Review, Der Greif, Photoworks UK, and FOTOFILMIC JRNL. She is the recipient of several grants and honors and has exhibited and completed residencies at institutions including Pratt Munson College of Art & Design and the Wassaic Project. She may also have the best name in the business.
Steven Duede, Visual Artist
Home Studio
I look at a lot of photographs. I also spend a fair amount of time watching other people look at them. We recently had one of Quincey Spagnoletti’s works on view in the museum, and many of our visitors were mesmerized trying to figure out what exactly was happening in the image in front of them. A successful work of art should make you want (need!) to take a second look, and it should stay with you afterwards. Spagnoletti’s photographs do precisely that, layering images and spaces in ways that challenge our vision and thinking.
Quincey Spagnoletti’s work explores how gendered roles begin to seep into our beings at birth, embedded in the objects that surround us and the roles we are instructed to play as we grow up. Her work is filled with layers of things—objects and figures and photographs of objects and figures—all collected and assembled into one constrained space. Material culture is a powerful tool in exploring both memory and identity. We are not the same age, but much of what made its way into Spagnoletti’s photographs resonated deeply. For so many artists, and for many women, the home and the studio are the same space. Spagnoletti blurs the boundaries between those spaces so completely one is reminded how transformative it can be to finally establish a space and identity of one’s own.
Jessica Roscio
Director and Curator, Danforth Art Museum
Beginning with personal narratives & conversations with the maternal figures in my life, I set out to construct my own perception of space, & inheritance, based on memory.
Home Studio
When I look back at my childhood and how I was raised I am confronted with ideas and notions on how a woman is supposed to act and “perform” for society. Through my pictorial and arts related explorations of womanhood, I strive to push back against the traditional norms that have dominated my upbringing, in the process highlighting the challenges of my own internalizations of a women’s role and my attempts to disrupt and unlearn what I have inherited.
Beginning with personal narratives and conversations with the maternal figures in my life, I set out to construct my own perception of space, and inheritance, based on memory. I incorporate human-scaled objects and props, the stuff of childhood and growing up, to ornament this investigation of perception. It is my intention to have the viewer question my intentionality and awareness, to wonder about where I am situated in the narrative of the work.
The nature of control continues to be a recurring theme in my work. I use the camera as a tool to elucidate my own emotions and my relationship to myself and those closest to me. My current studio practice is a back-and-forth between pathos and this notion of control – a constant search for who I am as a woman and how I want to present myself to society. In this way, I hope to leave an inquiry of the matriarchal and the matrilineal for the generations to come.
-Quincey Spagnoletti
Quincey Spagnoletti
Quincey Spagnoletti
Quincey Spagnoletti is a Boston-based photographer whose practice explores identity and womanhood through photography, installation, and performance. Rooted in her personal history, her work combines images of the body with archival photographs from her childhood to construct layered narratives that examine memory, selfhood, and representation. Spagnoletti received a BA from Colgate University and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Her work has been featured in The Boston Globe, Boston Art Review, Der Greif, Photoworks UK, and FOTOFILMIC JRNL, among other publications. She is the recipient of the Levitate Foundation Emerging Visual Artist Grant (2026) a City of Boston Opportunity Fund Grant (2026 & 2024) and the CAA Becker Fund for Visual Artists Grant (2025). She was recognized as one of Lenscratch's Top 25 Photographers to Watch (2024) and a Top 200 Critical Mass Finalist (2024). Spagnoletti was the 2025–2026 artist-in-residence at Pratt Munson College of Art & Design, where she presented her debut solo exhibition, Home Studio, at the Pratt Munson Gallery at the Munson Museum of Art. She was a summer artist-in-residence at the Wassaic Project (2026). And is currently a visual artist-in-residence at the Umbrella Arts Center in Concord, MA..
Visit: Quincey