Deitch Projects
(1996 – 2010)
In the course of fourteen years in New York’s Soho arts’ district, Deitch Projects completely reconfigured people’s expectations about art. Its founder Jeffrey Deitch was already a well-known art advisor, curator and critic when in 1996 he decided to open his own gallery, where he remained committed to the populist and irreverent impulses of the 1970s and 80s. Visitors to Deitch Projects could always count on being both challenged and entertained.
A good example of Deitch’s approach to art was his first curatorial venture, Lives: Artist Who Deal With Peoples’ Lives (Including Their Own) As The Subject And/Or The Medium Of Their Work (1975). With an emphasis on real-world experiences, and his belief that living could be an art form in itself, the artists explored ethnic and gender issues, as well as, different ways of meshing art and real life. Working with diverse groups of artists each with their own concerns, Deitch Projects presented performance art, environments, multi-media, as well as traditional painting and sculpture.
Deitch Projects closed in 2010 when Jeffrey Deitch was appointed director of the LA Museum of Contemporary Art. But the history of the gallery lives on in the Deitch Projects Exhibition Archives 1996-2010, as well as through the cards and flyers created for each exhibition.
From the Collection
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• Andy Warhol
• Card
• Deitch Projects
• Donald Baechler
• Film & Video
• Jean-Michel Basquiat
• New York City
• Off White
• Tony Shafrazi Gallery
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• Charlie Ahearn
• Collaborative Projects Inc (COLAB)
• Deitch Projects
• Jim Fricke
• Music Ephemera
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Christy Rupp: Rats and Other Early Works, 1979–1983
CollectionsChristy Rupp achieved early fame with her art when a street poster she created became the focus of widespread media attention in 1979 during a contentious, three-week strike by NYC sanitation workers. -
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Letters and Ephemera: Anne MacDonald, Sam Wagstaff, Robert Mapplethorpe
CollectionsThe connection between Anne MacDonald (1942 – 2018) and Sam Wagstaff (1921 – 1987) dates back to the early 1970s when she was on the Board of Trustees at the Detroit Institute of Art where he was a curator. Despite her title, MacDonald was still in her 20s and… -
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Photo Cut-Outs: M. Henry Jones’ Film Soul City, 1977–79
CollectionsThe emergence of digital photography during the last decade has provided a new perspective on photographs from the pre-digital era. The photographs that M. Henry Jones created in the late 1970s for the animated film Soul City have a special place in this story of technological change. -
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Marlene Dumas: Fifty Years of Art Ephemera
CollectionsMarlene Dumas will be adding to her remarkable forty-year career that includes scores of exhibitions at top galleries and museums. A valuable byproduct of this exhibition history is a large cache of gallery cards, brochures, posters and other promotional materials. -
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40 Top Art Events of the Downtown Era: A Timeline, 1974–1992
CollectionsThe Downtown Era began in the 1970s, when aspiring artists of the baby-boomer generation arrived in New York. Over the next two decades, they would radically change the art world, opening it up to new forms of media, new modes of exhibiting art, and new social perspectives. -
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Talk is Cheap: A Street Poster Exhibition, 1984
CollectionsIn the 1970s and 80s much of downtown New York lay in decay but amidst the economic squalor a surprising art renaissance emerged along the district’s streets and walls. Most people remember the graffiti from that period but of equal interest was the profusion of street posters. This was the… -
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The Strange World of Neke Carson: Early Works, 1970–85
CollectionsThis is a show filled with unusual masterpieces: psychologically-charged drawings that hint at impropriety; ephemera from guerrilla performances staged in Soho galleries without permission; the notorious rectal-realist paintings created with a paintbrush in his behind; and objects connected with ventures like Carson’s LaRocka Modeling Agency and LaRocka Nite Club (later… -
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Stefan Eins: the Enigma Behind 3 Mercer Street and Fashion Moda, 1970–80
CollectionsAs the founder of two idiosyncratic, do-it-yourself art spaces, Stefan Eins played a central role in shaking up the insular, overly-intellectualized art world of the 1970s in favor of a more socially-engaged, multi-cultural art with broader public appeal. … -
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BLADE, King of Graffiti: Cards, Photographs, Drawings, Publications
CollectionsIn the words of curator Roger Gastman, “Before New York City made graffiti world famous, BLADE was one of the people who made it famous in New York.” BLADE (Steven Ogburn) was only fifteen years old when in 1972 he tagged his first train. By 1974 he was painting full… -
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Anton Perich: Electric Brushstrokes, 1978–1989
CollectionsA childhood tinkerer and an aspiring inventor, Perich achieved success in 1977 by creating a machine that automatically produced a sequence of lines with an airbrush activated by a photocell reacting to the lights and darks of projected images. -
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Andrew Castrucci & Bullet Space: A Lower East Side Art Squat, 1980s & ’90s
CollectionsIn the mid-1980s, as gentrification encroached on the East Village, the neighborhood’s eastern fringe remained a lawless landscape of abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn lots. -
![Since cameras were banned from courtrooms, news outlets depended on professional sketch artists like Freda Reiter for visuals. When Reiter was assigned the Watergate burglary trial, in 1973, she had no idea that she would be spending the better part of two years in Washington.]()
Watergate Courtroom Sketches by Freda L. Reiter, 1973–75
CollectionsTo provide sufficient visuals for the substantial airtime allotted to the story each night, Reiter made multiple sketches a day: close-up portraits, as well as wide-angle views of the courtroom incorporating as many as 28 figures.
