Jeffrey Deitch

Jeffrey Deitch (pronounced DIE-tch;[1] born July 9, 1952) is an American art dealer and curator. He is best known for his gallery Deitch Projects (1996–2010) and curating groundbreaking exhibitions such as Lives (1975) and Post Human (1992), the latter of which has been credited with introducing the concept of "posthumanism" to popular culture.[2][3] In 2010, ArtReview named him as the twelfth most influential person in the international art world.[4]

Jeffrey Deitch
Jeffrey Deitch
Deitch in 2007
BornJuly 9, 1952
Hartford, Connecticut, US
Alma materWesleyan University (1974); Harvard Business School (1978)
Occupation(s)art dealer, curator
Years active1972-
Websitedeitch.com

Deitch has been closely associated with artists such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jeff Koons. From 2010 to 2013, he served as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA).[5] He currently owns and directs Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, an art gallery with locations in New York and Los Angeles.[6]

Early life and education

Deitch was born on July 9, 1952, and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, where his father ran a heating oil and coal company and his mother was an economist.[7] He attended public high school in West Hartford, Connecticut, from 1967 to 1970. He was an exchange student in Paris in 1968,[8] and in Japan in 1969.[7] He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1974 and received an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1978.[9]

Career

Deitch opened his first gallery as a college student in 1972 at the Curtis Inn, a rented hotel parlor in Lenox, Massachusetts,[7] and sold out the first week. Fascinated by the work of Andy Warhol and other contemporary artists,[10] he later moved to New York and worked as a receptionist at John Weber Gallery in SoHo.[11] From 1979 to 1988, Deitch helped develop and co-manage the art advisory and art finance department at Citibank.[12][13] In this capacity, he lent money to major art collectors and facilitated loans to small galleries like Gracie Mansion for its 1984 renovation.[14][15] Having become a regular at Warhol’s Factory, Deitch also introduced Warhol to a number of wealthy clients to draw their portraits.[10] In 2022, he appeared in the documentary series The Andy Warhol Diaries to discuss their friendship.[16]

Deitch was also a friend of and art dealer for Jean-Michel Basquiat. He was the first dealer to buy a work by the artist[17] and the first person to write about his work in print.[18][19] He later delivered the eulogy at Basquiat's funeral[19][20] and served on the artwork authentication committee for the artist's estate.[1]

From 1988 to 1996, Deitch was a successful private dealer and art adviser to a number of collectors,[21] including Jose Mugrabi.[22][14] As advisor to Goldman Sachs for the public art in its 200 West Street New York headquarters in 2006, Deitch helped to realize Julie Mehretu's 80-foot-long work "Mural",[23] described by one critic as "one of the largest and most successful public art works in recent times".[24]

In 1989, he bid US$10.5 million and paid $11.55 million for Jackson Pollock's silvery No. 8, 1950, then a record at auction for a work by the artist and the second-highest price at auction for a work by any contemporary artist.[25] In 2006, he bought Bridget Riley's Untitled (Diagonal Curve) (1966), at Sotheby's for $2.1 million, nearly three times its $730,000 high estimate and also a record for the artist.[26]

Over his career, Deitch has crafted for himself a unique role that merges curatorial profile with the business side of art.[27]

Curatorial projects

Since 1975, Deitch has curated exhibitions internationally. Among his most celebrated projects are Lives (1975),[28] Born in Boston (1979),[29] New Portrait (1984) at Moma PS1,[30] and Form Follows Fiction (2001) at Castello di Rivoli, Turin.[31]

Between 1988 and 2008, Deitch curated numerous shows at Deste Foundation, Athens, including:

  • Cultural Geometry (1988)[32]
  • Psychological Abstraction (1989)[33]
  • Artificial Nature (1990)[34]
  • Post Human (1992)[35]
  • Everything that’s Interesting is New (1996)[36][37]
  • Fractured Figure (2007-2008)[38]

In addition to Deste, Post Human was presented at five venues, including the Castello di Rivoli (Turin), Deichtorhallen (Hamburg), and The Israel Museum (Jerusalem).[39] Philosopher Rosi Braidotti and others credit the show with introducing the term "posthuman" into the popular consciousness.[3][40]

In 1995, he wrote the strategic plan for the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.[41] His other curatorial projects have included the Venice Biennale's Aperto (1993),[42] City as Studio (K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong, 2023),[43] and Confluence (Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, Mumbai, 2023), collaborating with poet Ranjit Hoskote on the latter.[44]

Deitch is known as an advocate for street art and has headed several influential public art projects with street artists.[11][45] He initiated Wynwood Walls with Tony Goldman in Miami in 2009[45][46] and Coney Art Walls on Coney Island in New York in 2015.[47]

Art writing

In 1980, he became a regular columnist of Flash Art and the first U.S. editor of Flash Art International. His writings have appeared in numerous international magazines, including Art in America, Artforum, Garage, Interview magazine, Kaleidoscope, Paper magazine, and Purple magazine.

Deitch Projects (1996–2010)

In 1996, Deitch opened Deitch Projects in SoHo in New York City. He stated in a later interview that he was inspired by the example of Warhol's Factory to try to "create space for another generation of misfits."[10] His first shows included works by Vanessa Beecroft, Jocelyn Taylor, Nari Ward, Yoko Ono, and Mariko Mori.[48][49] Soon after, he bought the building housing Canal Lumber, a bigger space around the corner on Wooster Street. The first major exhibition project there was of a Barbara Kruger video-and-slide-projection show in 1997.[7]

An early advocate of graffiti art in the 1980s, he later introduced New York to the style of street art which had originated in San Francisco in the 1990s among artists on the fringe of the skateboard scene.[50] Deitch became well known as a supporter of young artists like Kehinde Wiley and Cecily Brown, while also representing the work of more established artists like Keith Haring and Jeff Koons. In the 1990s, Deitch helped fund Koons' expensive “Celebration series” and also organized the artist’s 50th birthday party at his gallery.[51][52]

In conjunction with Creative Time and Paper Magazine, Deitch Projects also organized SoHo's annual Art Parade, with over 1,000 participants from 2005 to 2008.[53][54]

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

In 2010, Jeffery Deitch was appointed Director to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), which was seeking to recover from low attendance and a near-bankruptcy following the Great Recession.[11][53] Before stepping into the new role, Deitch closed Deitch Projects and also resigned from the Basquiat authentication committee.[1]

During his three-year tenure, Deitch advised and curated seminal exhibitions such as Dennis Hopper: Double Standard (2010),[55] The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol (2012)[56] and Art in the Streets (2011), the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art.[57] In 2013, he helped organize a show by Urs Fischer in which the artist collaborated with 1000 LA residents to fill an exhibition space with clay figures.[58] Additionally, Deitch conceived MOCAtv, the first original YouTube channel dedicated to fine art.[59] Deitch donated his after-tax salary back to the museum throughout his tenure.[60]

By 2012, Deitch's directorship led to what one commentator called a "cultural collision" between Deitch's more popular art tastes and MOCA's previous interests.[53][61][62] Though Deitch was acknowledged to have boosted museum attendance to record levels, critics charged that MOCA's shows sometimes prioritized popular exhibits over artists who were well-known in the LA art scene or over more traditional scholarly concerns.[53] In 2012, as the conflict grew, MOCA's board of trustees unanimously voted to ask for the resignation of its longtime chief curator Paul Schimmel, leading to the resignation of four artists on MOCA's board in protest.[53][63] Deitch resigned from MOCA the following year.[62]

Return to art dealing

In 2014, Deitch published Live the Art on the 15-year history of Deitch Projects.[64][65] In 2015, he began hosting shows at 76 Grand Street in New York, one of his former gallery spaces. In July 2016, he reopened his Lower Manhattan gallery at 18 Wooster Street, the space he ran from 1996 to 2010 and rented out to the Swiss Institute for the following five years.[66] Deitch now runs the two spaces under Jeffrey Deitch Inc. Since reopening the gallery, Deitch has organized exhibitions by Ai Weiwei, Kenny Scharf, Austin Lee, Bisa Butler,[67] Kenturah Davis,[68] Sasha Gordon,[69] Kennedy Yanko,[70] and Walter Robinson, among others.[71]

Every year, during Art Basel Miami Beach, Deitch's gallery collaborates with art dealer Larry Gagosian on a thematic exhibition. From 2015 to 2021, the exhibitions were housed in The Moore Building of Miami's Design District.[72]

In 2018, Deitch opened a new 15,000-square-foot (1,400-square-metre) space in Hollywood, designed by Frank Gehry, specifically to mount what he described as "museum-level" exhibitions.[73] The gallery was inaugurated with a solo exhibition of Ai Weiwei, followed by shows by Urs Fischer, Judy Chicago,[74] Robert Longo,[75] Nadia Lee Cohen,[76] and Refik Anadol, among others.[77] The gallery has also organized large-scale thematic exhibitions such as Shattered Glass (curated by AJ Girard and Melahn Frierson),[78] 2021), Clay Pop (curated by Alia Dahl, 2022),[79][80] and Wonder Women (curated by Kathy Huang, 2023).[81]

In 2019, Deitch edited Unrealism, a publication on new figurative painting featuring the most groundbreaking contemporary artists and their important predecessors.[82] The following year, he conceived the creation of the Gallery Association Los Angeles (GALA), to "generate excitement about the L.A. gallery scene" and shared his idea with a group of gallerists in Los Angeles.[83] In May 2020, GALA launched galleryplatform.la, an online platform that serves the dynamic Los Angeles art community with editorial content and rotating online viewing rooms.[84] In 2022, Deitch opened a second location in a historic building on Santa Monica Boulevard, the former home of Radio Recorders, a studio that recorded Elvis Presley and Billie Holiday, among others.[85]

References
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