Jeffrey Deitch

Jeffrey Deitch (born 1952) is an American art dealer and curator who was from 2010 until his resignation in 2013 director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA).

Deitch (pronounced DIE-tch) was born in 1952 and grew up in Connecticut, where his father ran a heating-oil and coal company and his mother was an economist. He attended public high school in West Hartford, Connecticut, from 1967 to 1970. He was an exchange student in Paris in 1968, and in Japan in 1969. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1974 and received an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1978.

Deitch opened his first gallery as a college student in 1972 at the Curtis Hotel, a rented hotel parlor in Lenox, Massachusetts, and sold out the first week. Later he worked as a receptionist at John Weber Gallery in SoHo. From 1979 to 1988, Deitch helped develop and co-manage the art advisory and art finance department at Citibank. In 1980, he became a regular columnist of Flash Art and the first U.S. editor of Flash Art International.

From 1988 to 1996 Deitch was a successful private dealer and art adviser to a number of collectors, including Jose Mugrabi. 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.

In 1996 Deitch opened the Deitch Projects gallery in the Soho section of New York City. His first shows included works by Vanessa Beecroft, Jocelyn Taylor, Nari Ward, and Mariko Mori. 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 the fall of 1997.

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