Gallery will shutter after years of showcasing cutting-edge art

While Chelsea is now home to the majority of New York’s galleries, SoHo once ruled the art scene. June 1 will mark another major loss to the neighborhood and the art community at large, when Deitch Projects closes its doors and ends its fourteen-year run as one of the city’s most innovative and stylish galleries. Deitch—which has two spaces in SoHo and one in Long Island City—will be forced to close as its founder, Jeffrey Deitch, takes the helm at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Since its inception in 1996, Deitch has cultivated young artists and novel projects alike. The gallery has invested big money in art that operates both inside spaces and often outside them, commissioning pieces like street murals and art parades. The work in the gallery is more fun and more powerful than most in the contemporary scene, evoking a sense of wonder even when other contemporary art tends towards dark and onerous.

For example, as America wallowed in economic depression, Deitch artist SWOON created “Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea,” in which she and a crew made seven boat-sculptures that sailed down the Hudson River. The group landed several times, performing plays and displaying the mobile sculptures, with their final stop at the gallery.

The gallery is known for fostering new artists, like contemporary urban portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, and for being the place where both performance and party occur. The electropop group Fischerspooner has played at Deitch, an exercise in “entertainment and spectacle” according to Deitch’s website. In January a rumor even circulated that Columbia favorite son James Franco was going to be filmed for a video project at Deitch, a spinoff of his appearance on soap opera “General Hospital.”

Several other more overtly artistic Columbia affiliates have been featured at Deitch. Brad Kahlhamer, a Deitch artist dealing with new appropriations of Native American images, participated in the invited artist program at LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia. Elizabeth Neel, MFA ’07—a painter who straddles the divide between obvious physicality and seeming abstraction—is also represented by Deitch.

For the last hurrah of a gallery like no other—and to mourn the loss of an art world great—visit Deitch for its last SoHo exhibit. Titled “May Day,” the exhibit features the work of renowned street artist Shepard Fairey, most known for being the creator of OBEY GIANT and the now-iconic Obama HOPE poster.

Fairey, while always associated with political messages, is currently embroiled in legal affairs regarding the Obama poster. The Associated Press is currently suing him for non-legal use of a photograph used for the piece. “May Day” might then be the perfect last show for Deitch—controversial, relevant, aesthetically pleasing, and influential, Fairey squarely occupies the niche Deitch helped to create.

Deitch’s last project opens Saturday, May 1, and runs until May 26. The gallery is located at 18 Wooster St. (between Grand and Canal streets).