San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Key figure in downtown N.Y. art, music scenes of ’70s, ’80s
Diego Cortez, an influential figure in New York City’s downtown art and music scenes who in 1981 curated a massive exhibition featuring dozens of artists that brought then20yearold JeanMichel Basquiat to public renown, died Monday in Burlington, N.C. He was 74.
The cause was kidney failure, his sister Kathy Hudson said. He died in hospice care at her house but had been living nearby in Saxapahaw.
Cortez seemed to be everywhere in SoHo, Tribeca and beyond in the late 1970s and early ’80s. He cofounded the Mudd Club, a gritty, boundarypushing nightclub that opened in 1978. He performed with Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker; directed music videos for Blondie and the Talking Heads; mounted shows of drawings and photographs by
rock singersongwriter Patti Smith; and wrote “Private Elvis,” a book with photographs of Presley’s time in the Army that Cortez found in West Germany.
Then came the “New York/ New Wave” show in 1981. Held at the cuttingedge P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) in Long Island City, Queens, the exhibition demonstrated Cortez’s eclectic knowledge of the visual and musical worlds in which he had been immersed since he moved to New York City.
He recruited more than 100 artists for the show, among them Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, David Byrne, William Burroughs, Futura 2000, Ann Magnuson, Fab 5 Freddy and Basquiat, whom he had met on the dance floor of the Mudd Club.
“It was huge — literally 600 to 700 works of art that took three weeks to install, using two installation crews,” P.S. 1 founder Alana Heiss said by phone. “He was very persuasive: We started with one group of galleries on the first floor and ended up on two floors.”
“Diego was full of unquenchable passion,” she said.
Curt Hoppe, a photorealist painter whose work was in the exhibition, recalled: “He brought uptown and downtown together, graffiti and downtown artists, and he hung it in an unusual way, splattering everything on the walls. It was a riveting show.”
He added: “Diego was the epitome of cool.”
James Allan Curtis was born Sept. 30, 1946, in Geneva, Ill., and grew up nearby in Wheaton. His father, Allan, was a warehouse manager for a steel company, and his mother, Jean (Ham) Curtis, was a manicurist.
After graduating from Illinois State University with a bachelor’s degree, he earned a master’s degree in 1973 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied film, video and performance art. His teachers included avantgarde filmmaker Stan Brakhage and video artist Nam June Paik.
He changed his name to Diego Cortez before moving to New York City in 1973, adopting it as an artistic pseudonym and as a reflection of the Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago where he had lived.
Once in New York, he worked as a studio assistant to conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim and then to video and performance artist Vito Acconci. Over the next few years, as he became further enmeshed in the downtown music and art worlds, he held a variety of jobs, including one as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art. The job inspired Anderson in 1977 to release “Time to Go (For Diego),” a song that tells how Cortez, working the late shift, would tell people when it was time to leave:
Or, as he put it, snap them out of their … art trances.
People who had been standing in front of one thing for hours.
He would jump in front of them and snap his fingers. And he’d say, “Time to go.” Cortez’s career after “New York/New Wave” was multifaceted, but he never organized another enormous exhibition like that one. He was an occasional agent and curator; collaborated on projects with his friend Brian Eno, an innovative musician and producer; and served as an art adviser to the Luciano Benetton and Frederik Roos collections. He composed an album, “Traumdetung” (2014), a mix of music and his snoring. And at one point he tried, unsuccessfully, to start a museum in Puerto Rico.
“His main goal was to support artists by having collectors buy their work or to get their work into museums,” said his sister, who organized exhibitions with her brother at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, where she worked.
In addition to her, Cortez is survived by another sister, Carol Baum, and a brother, Daniel Curtis.
Smith, in a phone interview, said she first got to know Cortez in the 1970s. He later urged her to resume working on her visual art, which she had largely stopped pursuing during a long hiatus from public life.
“He was a bridge to helping me get my feet back on the ground,” she said.
He helped curate a show of her drawings and photos at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2002 and an exhibition of her photos in 2010 at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where he was the curator of photography at the time.
“He didn’t like to stand in other people’s light,” Smith said. “He wanted Basquiat to stand on his own. He wanted me to stand on my own at my exhibition in New Orleans. He was really interested in seeing people he thought had promise flower.”