Joe La Placa

Joe La Placa (b. New York 1959 - ) is an American art dealer in London. A gallerist, writer and arts organization innovator, La Placa first became noted in the 1980s as a promoter and exhibitor of graffiti, especially as co-founder of the Gallozzi-La Placa Gallery (New York) with Guillaume Gallozzi. The gallery worked with leading graffiti artists (in some contexts producers of graffiti are referred to as "writers" ). The focus of the gallery later diversified into presenting other visual art movements, including Italian Futurists, the Hudson River School, and British surrealists. La Placa spent some years as Foreign Editor for ArtReview and as the chief London representative and writer for Artnet, the online art auctions company. In 2007, with hedge fund mogul Mike Platt, head of BlueCrest Capital Management, La Placa co-founded All Visual Arts (AVA) a London-based gallery and arts patronage organization capitalized by the hedge fund and considered by some reviewers to represent a new direction in how visual arts are produced and represented.

La Placa started out in New York as an artist and then, perhaps because of a more scientific or technical mindset, which he himself attributed in later interviews to the influence of his family (his father was a physicist), he migrated toward fabrication.

In 1983 La Placa, in partnership with French gallerist Guillaume Gallozzi, established the Gallozzi-La Placa Gallery in New York's TriBeCa. Over the next few years the gallery worked with and represented many notable artists of the graffiti / "writing" genre, including Phase 2, Delta, Sharp, Rammellzee and Lee Quiñones.

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