SPECTOR was born in a South Philadelphia storefront in 1999, the lovechild of the artist Shelley Spector. Since then, it has grown into many things—an oasis, playroom, community center, launching pad, salon, and a home away from home—while nurturing a generation of artists who span the breach between art and life with paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, photographs, music and installations. In 2006, the gallery closed its physical space and continued its mission to champion emerging talent and new concepts in the visual arts as SPECTOR Projects, this time working outside the traditional gallery format. SPECTOR’s artists have shown in the streets, museums and galleries from Tokyo to Milan and Paris, and their works have entered the permanent collections of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and MOMA in New York. To demystify life in the arts, SPECTOR recently launched ArtJaw.com, an on line collection of first-person stories by some of Philly’s beloved art-community characters.

SPECTOR and its artists—an evolving cast that includes stalwarts such as Jim Houser, Whitney Lee, Ben Woodward, Randall Sellers, and CW Wells—affectionately ignore the boundaries between popular culture and fine art, between insider and outsider.
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