Deitch [DIEtsch], 57, is one of New York’s leading gallerists, specializing in modern and contemporary art, and he has a 30-year career as an independent curator who has produced innovative exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world. As an art advisor to some of the world’s leading institutional and private collectors, he has helped build a number of major international contemporary art collections. He also advised Mori Building Company in Tokyo on the development of the Mori Art Museum and the Roppongi Hills Public Art & Design Project.
A longtime art writer and critic, Deitch is known for his innovations in catalogue design. The books that accompanied his exhibitions Post Human and Artificial Nature were among the first to introduce the concept of a visual essay. Deitch is co-author of a major monograph "Keith Haring", (2008), and he wrote the introduction to "Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1981", "The Studio of the Street", (2007). He has written catalogue texts for exhibitions at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
Deitch is well regarded internationally for his innovative curatorial vision. Lives, a 1975 exhibition about artists who used their own lives as an art medium, was Deitch’s first important curatorial project. Since then, he has curated a number of exhibitions of contemporary art for the Deste Foundation in Athens, including "Cultural Geometry", (1988), "Artificial Nature", (1990), "Post Human", (1992), "Everything That’s Interesting Is New", (1996), and "Fractured Figure", (2007). Post Human was also presented at four other museums: FAE Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lausanne, the Castello di Rivoli in Torino, the Deste Foundation in Athens, the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. He curated Strange Abstraction for the Touko Museum in Tokyo in 1991 and Form Follows Fiction at the Castello di Rivoli in Torino, Italy.
Since 1996, he has operated Deitch Projects, a public gallery with three New York locations that has presented more than 250 exhibitions, performances, and installations by contemporary artists. Among Deitch Projects’s notable exhibitions are Yoko Ono’s "Ex It", Keith Haring’s "Ten Commandments", and "Street Market" with Barry McGee, Todd James, and Stephen Powers.
Deitch pioneered the banking world’s art advisory businesses, co-founding Citibank’s art advisory and art finance practices in 1979. His connections to MOCA date back to his work at Citibank, which was the lead contributor to The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (formerly The Temporary Contemporary) when it opened in 1983.
Before joining Citibank, Deitch was the assistant director of the John Weber Gallery in New York and the curator of the De Cordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Mass. Deitch served as the first American editor of Flash Art, and he received an Art Critic’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979. Deitch has a bachelor’s degree in art history from Wesleyan University and a M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Deitch’s hiring caps a comeback year for MOCA, one marked by the addition of 10 new trustees, a successful MOCA NEW 30th Anniversary Gala in November that drew more than 1,000 international, national, and local celebrities, collectors, artists, and patrons and raised more than $4 million, bringing the museum’s one year fundraising total to $64 million.
Deitch will succeed Charles E. Young, who was named MOCA chief executive officer in December 2008 following the resignation of director Jeremy Strick.
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