ARTISTS

Morgan Levy

Project Space (2025)

Spark of a Nail

Morgan Levy is a photo-based artist and educator originally from Philadelphia, PA. She is a
recipient of the 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography and was a
Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation and a Puffin Foundation grantee in 2024. In 2023 she was
a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize and participated in UnionDocs’ Research &
Development lab.

Her work is currently on view at Large Glass gallery in London in the group exhibition Light
Industry, was recently on view at Copeland Gallery in London as part of the 2025 V&A Parasol
Foundation Prize, and was included in the group exhibition On Land and Place at the Vermont
Center for Photography. In 2024, her work was shown as a part of group exhibitions at the
Throughline Collective in Houston, TX and Gallery Kannski in Reykjavik, Iceland. Previous group
exhibitions include the Print Center, Philadelphia, PA (2021), Archive/Project Space, Pittsfield,
MA (2021), and Society for Photographic Education, Philadelphia, PA (2018).
Her photographs have been published in contemporary art journals including Artforum, 1000
Words Magazine, Valentine Editions, and Capricious Magazine. Her work has also been published in
numerous publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Time, and The
New Republic.

Levy received her MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art in 2020 and a BFA from Tisch
School of the Arts at New York University in 2007. She is currently a part-time faculty member in
the Photography Department at Parsons School of Design in New York, NY. She lives with her
partner Håkan, their cat, and their child in Brooklyn, NY.

Spark of a Nail, an exhibition of new and recent works by photographer Morgan Levy. This selection of Levy’s participatory, lens-based pieces situate women and non-binary individuals at the intersection of photography, labor, and the built environment.
Throughout her work, Levy takes an interest in photography’s generative potential, its capacity to
probe and visualize what is often hidden or ignored, frequently turning her lens towards
environments or landscapes in flux or transition. For Spark of a Nail, Levy collaborated with
tradespeople in both apprenticeship programs and professional settings, providing a forum for
conversation and demonstration of expertise. The resulting images enact a form of
world-making, where acts of labor and gestures of rest unfold within physical and material spaces
that women and non-binary people build and transform of their own volition.
Combining documentary, staged photography, and performance, Levy places this body of work in
dialogue with two distinct visual histories: early 20th-century images of U.S. labor, which largely
excluded minority groups and often served political goals, as well as feminist photographic
practices of the 1970s and ‘80s, such as those of the various photographers included in The
Woman’s Carpentry Book and photographer and investigative reporter Betty Medsger. Levy also
draws inspiration from sculptural works of that era, such as Lynda Benglis’ radical “pours,” which
subvert expectations about industrial materials.
Through research, observation, sketching, and discussion with her collaborators, Levy stages
re-performances of acts or work that she has observed. This method of making enables the artist
to disrupt the ways in which patriarchal power is traditionally modeled as a hierarchical system in
hypermasculine professional realms. Deliberate framing choices leave cis-men at the periphery of
the photographs, as Levy constructs a world almost exclusively populated by women and
non-binary individuals engaged in a collective and speculative building project.

At the same time, Levy recognizes the continued presence of sexism, racism, and threats of
violence in the building trades. Her work underscores how tradeswomen themselves are often
perceived as threats, not only to established economic hierarchies, but also to the perception of
building work as inherently masculine. Emerging at the condensation point where labor, images,
identity, and the built environment coalesce, the artist’s work is at once a reflection and a
necessary form of resistance. Through a choreography of bodies, her images acknowledge
real-life contingencies and gesture toward futures in which old structures give way and new
forms are collectively built.