Laura Whitcomb is a curator and historian whose scholarship is anchored in surrealist studies and postwar art, with a focus on bringing lesser‑known artists and histories into clear, research‑based view. Through Label Curatorial she develops collection‑based research exhibitions, catalogues, and public programs for museums, galleries, and foundations, with particular expertise in postwar California, artist‑ and poet‑run spaces, and archives connected to hermetic and related philosophical frameworks. Her projects have addressed the Light and Space movement, Bay Area artist‑run and poet‑run galleries, the Dilexi Gallery, and the channeler‑artist Paulina Peavy, as well as extended work as a resident scholar at the Gala–Salvador Dalí Foundation in Figueres.

Her recent and ongoing commissions engage art and trauma, artists working with esoteric and para‑philosophical influences, and the role of experimental music, dance, and immersive performance in shifting perceptual experience in the postwar period. She has contributed to museum catalogues, advised institutions and cultural programming platforms on how to navigate the current cultural climate with attentiveness to language, context, and representation, prepared archives for placement in research centres, and created in‑depth dossiers on artists whose work has not been adequately documented or contextualized. Beginning her career in the late 1980s, she wrote for publications such as Blitz and contributed to the underground anthology Apocalypse Culture while organizing early curatorial projects, including the first presentation in California of British designers from the 1980s zeitgeist—among them Vivienne Westwood and the House of Beauty and Culture. She later founded the clothing line and gallery space Label in New York’s SoHo (1990s–2010), where exhibitions and fashion collections were conceived around shared conceptual themes; a dress from this period was recently acquired for the costume collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Since 2010, she has worked with institutions on commissions that integrate deep archival research with exhibition‑making and publishing, often centered on under‑recognized holdings within existing collections.