Jeffrey Deitch in conversation with Massimiliano Gioni
March 25, 2015, 7pm
The New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
42nd Street at 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10018
On the occasion of the release of Jeffrey Deitch’s Live the Art, he and Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director of New York’s New Museum, will discuss the way art and its audiences have changed over the past 15 years.
Jeffrey Deitch has been involved with modern and contemporary art for more than 40 years as an artist, writer, curator, dealer, and advisor. Deitch has been active as a critic and curator since the mid-1970s. Deitch’s first important curatorial project was Lives, a 1975 exhibition about artists who used their own lives as an art medium. In the 1970s, Deitch served as Assistant Director of the John Weber Gallery in New York and as Curator of the De Cordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Best known for his vanguard commercial gallery, Deitch Projects, Deitch produced more than 250 projects by contemporary artists during the gallery’s existence from 1996 through 2010. There, he championed artists such as Tauba Auerbach, Vanessa Beecroft, Barry McGee, Yoko Ono, and Kehinde Wiley. In 2014, Rizzoli published Live the Art, a major monograph detailing the history of Deitch Projects, designed by Stefan Sagmeister. Deitch co-authored a monograph on Keith Haring, published by Rizzoli in 2008, and wrote the introduction to Jean Michel Basquiat, 1981: The Studio of the Street, published by Charta in 2007. From 2010 to 2013, Deitch served as Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, where he organized major solo exhibitions of work by Urs Fischer, Weegee, and Kenneth Anger and curated seminal group shows including The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol and Art in the Streets, which had the highest attendance in the museum’s history.
Massimiliano Gioni is the Artistic Director of the New Museum, New York, and the Artistic Director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, Milan. At the New Museum, Gioni has curated solo exhibitions of work by Tacita Dean (2012); Carsten Höller (2011–12); Lynda Benglis (2011); Gustav Metzger (2011); Paul Chan (2008); and Urs Fischer (2008); in addition to group shows such as NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star (2013); Ghosts in the Machine (2012); Ostalgia (2011); the inaugural Triennial Younger Than Jesus (2009); and After Nature (2008), which have become signature events of the Museum’s programming. In 2014, Gioni and the Museum’s curatorial team organized solo shows by Paweł Althamer, Roberto Cuoghi, Camille Henrot, and Ragnar Kjartansson, as well as the group exhibition Here and Elsewhere, a vast survey of contemporary art from and about the Arab world. In October 2014, he curated the first American retrospective of the work of Chris Ofili. He has curated numerous international exhibitions and biennials including the 55th Venice Biennale, which he directed in 2013; the 8th Gwangju Biennial (2010); the 4th Berlin Biennial, co-curated with Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick (2006); and Manifesta 5, co-curated with Marta Kuzma (2004). He cofounded the Wrong Gallery with Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick, with whom he has directed the independent art magazines The Wrong Times and Charley. He is the commissioning editor of 2000 Words, a series of monographic books published by the Deste Foundation, with which he has frequently collaborated.
Be sure to check out LIVE’s other spring events, featuring RuPaul, Suzanne Farrell, Matthew Weiner, Diane von Furstenberg, David Blaine, and more.
LIVE from the NYPL is made possible with generous support from Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos and Adam Bartos, and the Margaret and Herman Sokol Public Education Endowment Fund.
Media sponsor: Financial Times
