For Jeffrey Deitch’s next New York project, he will show works by artist and poet Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel (1922–1995), better known as Cameron. The show, “Cameron: Cinderella of the Wastelands,” will open September 8 at 76 Grand Street, currently occupied by the Suzanne Geiss Company, and the former home of Deitch Projects.

Deitch Projects—which was housed at two locations—one at 76 Grand Street and the other at 18 Wooster Street (now occupied by the Swiss Institute)—closed in 2010, when Deitch shifted gears and became the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MOCA).

Recently, Deitch has organized exhibitions at Mana Contemporary and in Coney Island (see Jeffrey Deitch and Mana Contemporary Celebrate Armitage Dance and Art and Take a Look at Jeffrey Deitch’s New Coney Island Street Art Project), and hosted a controversial Miley Cyrus concert during Art Basel in Miami Beach (see Jeffrey Deitch Compares “Remarkable” Miley Cyrus to Mike Kelley).

The upcoming exhibition, as reported by the Art Newspaper, is probably not in keeping with Cameron’s wishes: in 1957, the Los Angeles Police Department shut down an exhibition at Los Angeles’s Ferus Gallery for indecency thanks to Cameron’s racy Untitled (Peyote Vision), which shows a couple having sex. Afterward, Cameron reportedly swore she would never show at a commercial gallery again.

Cameron, Untitled (Peyote Vision) (1955).
Photo: courtesy Cameron Parsons Foundation.

The show is an iteration of an earlier show that Deitch conceived for LA MOCA, “Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman,” which ran at the MOCA Pacific Design Center from October 11, 2014–January 18, 2015.

Peyote Vision will be one of roughly 60 works on view, with other drawings, paintings, and writings, some for sale, others on loan for the show.

During Deitch’s tumultuous West Coast stint (he departed after three years in the position, with two years left on his contract), Suzanne Geiss, the former executive director of Deitch Projects, took over the 76 Grand Street space with her own gallery, Suzanne Geiss Company.

In October, Deitch told the New York Times that he had no intention of relaunching Deitch Projects, and would instead periodically organize “super-exciting shows” in borrowed spaces. The Suzanne Geiss Company space is not so much borrowed, however, as reclaimed since Deitch still owns the building.

Jeffrey Deitch.
Photo: Andreas Branch, courtesy Patrick McMullan.

Based on the gallery website and Facebook page, Geiss does not appear to have staged an exhibition since “Blind Painting,” a show of work by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, which closed December 20. Geiss did not respond to a phone call from artnet News inquiring into the gallery’s current status.

Last year, Deitch took a fond look back at his gallery venture with Live the Art: 15 Years of Deitch Projects, a book from Rizzoli revisiting the many artist projects staged in the Grand Street space over the years (we heard Deitch speak on the occasion of the book’s release). If the Cameron show is any indication, there just might be a volume two some day after all.