In 1987 she was hired by
PS1, later becoming Program Coordinator for three years. While there, she organized the first US solo exhibition dedicated to pioneering Swedish abstract painter
Hilma af Klint, in 1989. She later worked as an assistant to artist
Dan Graham. Since 2006 she has been on the faculty of
Bard College, in
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, teaching painting in the Masters of Fine Arts program, and is frequently a visiting artist, scholar or lecturer at other colleges and museums. After winning the 1992 Rome Prize, in that year of uninterrupted time to pursue artistic development, Quaytman began to make a series of paintings which belonged together, which she described as "sentences." She cites her epiphany as "The stance of the painting is the profile", after which she thought of her paintings in the context of the audience walking by, grouped together and observed with peripheral vision. and
The Brooklyn Rail, noting "Quaytman makes reference in the title to both the seat of seeing (i am), and the classical meter of poetry", and "Quaytman's sophisticated dissection of the complexities of seeing and the manifold aspects that inform perception is evident not only in individual works, but also in the relationship between specific works installed in the exhibition, and in the cumulative effect of the whole," and
The New York Times "The paintings in R. H. Quaytman's exhibition are cerebral, physically thought out and resolutely optical. They engage painting on every level in a restrained way; they also engage one another." She starred in
Rosa von Praunheim's documentary
New York Memories (2010). Quaytman was selected for the 2010
Whitney Biennial. She was offered a north-facing room featuring a trapezoidal window designed by
Marcel Breuer. For the show, she created "Distracting Distance, Chapter 16", which reflects on the shape of the window and its reference to perspective, as well as on a famous painting in the Whitney – "A Woman in the Sun", by
Edward Hopper, painted in 1961, the year of her birth. Later in 2010, for the
Neuberger Museum of Art in
Purchase, New York, she created a retrospective exhibition "Spine, Chapter 20", of new pieces. Unlike all previous Chapters, this exhibit did not incorporate the specifics of the venue, instead reflecting upon all of her work to date. Together the Chapters form a figurative book – an overarching structure for all the paintings. "The installation itself has a 'spine': an 80-foot wall extending from one corner of the room, on which most of the roughly 30 paintings are hung, creating a sense of space – even emptiness, if you turn your attention toward the walls where paintings are customarily hung in the Neuberger." according to
The New York Times critic
Martha Schwendener. Pieces in this chapter pull elements from all her previous chapters, such as "Distracting Distance / Hardy", in which a nude woman stands in front of the Marcel Breuer window at the Whitney. "Spine, Chapter 20" also provided the final chapter of an impressive physical book – the retrospective she published in 2011,
Spine, with 380 color illustrations. In 2011, her painting was on the cover of
Artforum magazine, with an essay by Paul Galvez describing her international "triumvirate of installations" in the past three years. In 2017, her work was included in the Athens component of
documenta 14. in 2022 Her first major museum survey,
Morning, Chapter 30, was organized by the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, (MOCA) in 2016. In 2018, she created
+ x, Chapter 34, a body of work derived from the notebooks of
Hilma af Klint and presented alongside the Guggenheim's major retrospective of that artist. Her work is in numerous museum collections, including the Whitney,
MoMA,
The Guggenheim Museum,
SFMOMA, and
Tate Modern R. H. Quaytman is represented by
Miguel Abreu Gallery, and
Gladstone Gallery. ==Selected publications==