Jet Set, Knows Stars
January 8th, 2010
Will Jeffrey Deitch become the new director of L.A. MOCA? Rumor has it that he is among the finalists for the position. Lisa Phillips is another. The official announcement comes Monday. Who will win? No one knows! (Hungry hungry hippos!)
Some sources have noted how unusual it is for a museum to hire the director of a commercial art gallery, as museums usually hire academics and curators. But L.A. is no stranger to this: the late Walter Hopps, who co-founded the Ferus Gallery in L.A., later took on museum jobs.
From his Wikipedia page:
“In 1957 he founded the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles in partnership with Ed Kienholz, leaving in 1962 to become the director of the Pasadena Museum of Art, now Norton Simon Museum, where he mounted the first museum retrospectives of Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, as well as the first overview of American Pop Art, New Painting of Common Objects. His unconventional administrative skills led to him being fired in 1967. [2] He then became the director of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art”
P.S. The Ferus comes back for more pretty soon, at least for a short while.