1980's
Daria Deshuk’s work of the 1980s emerged from a New York in transition. The decade began with Deshuk immersed in the experimental culture of the East Village and saw her develop a visual language centered on the city, its inhabitants, and the relationship between observation and memory. Photography, performance, and painting frequently overlapped within her practice.
After receiving her BFA in Painting from Parsons School of Design, Deshuk became part of the community at P.S. 122, where she maintained a studio and exhibited her work. The name can be misleading today. P.S. 122 was not an art school, but a former New York City public school at 150 First Avenue, between East 9th and 10th Streets. After the school closed, artists began occupying its empty classrooms as studios in the late 1970s. By 1979, an artist cooperative had spread through 21 classrooms and established an artist-run gallery in the building.
The old school became an unusual creative ecosystem. Classrooms were converted into working studios while painters, photographers, sculptors, dancers, actors, musicians, and performance artists worked within the same aging institutional structure. The artists themselves helped maintain the space; accounts from its early history even describe members tending the building’s coal furnace during the winter. The former school auditorium developed separately into Performance Space 122, which became an important center for experimental performance in downtown New York. Rather than functioning as a conventional gallery or studio building, P.S. 122 allowed different artistic disciplines and communities to develop alongside one another. Deshuk participated in this environment while continuing her education, receiving her MFA from Hunter College in 1984. [1]
Just blocks away, Club 57 provided another center of gravity in Deshuk’s life. Located in the basement of a Polish church at 57 St. Mark’s Place, the club became a gathering place for the emerging East Village art community. Exhibitions, film screenings, music, fashion, performance, parties, and deliberately unclassifiable events shared the same small space. For the artists involved, the distinction between making art and participating in the culture around it could become remarkably fluid.
Deshuk worked at Club 57 and participated in its performances and events. Surviving photographs document her there as both participant and performer. It was also at Club 57 that Deshuk and artist Larry Rivers officially met, beginning a relationship that would become central to both her personal life and the decades that followed. Looking back on the atmosphere of the club, Deshuk recalled its intensely communal character: “Club 57 was a living room for Artists, we were entertainment tonight, not watching it on TV or the computer.” [2]
P.S. 122 and Club 57 were therefore more than background to Deshuk’s early work. Together they placed her within an artistic community in which painting existed alongside photography, performance, fashion, music, theater, and everyday social life. It was within this environment that the city itself increasingly became her subject.
As Deshuk later explained, “I started to use a camera and projection, and began making large paintings depicting the streets of the lower east side.” [2] Photography provided source material, but painting allowed the captured moment to be reconsidered through color, scale, light, atmosphere, and memory.
Her exhibition career developed alongside this work. In May 1982, Deshuk presented what contemporary reporting described as her first solo exhibition at Inroads Gallery in SoHo, showing paintings combining oil and enamel. The following month she participated in a group exhibition at Tower Gallery in Southampton. [3] She continued exhibiting in New York and on eastern Long Island throughout the decade while participating in studio exhibitions at P.S. 122.
By the middle of the decade, eastern Long Island had also become an important subject. The movement between Manhattan and the Hamptons established a geographical rhythm within her work: crowded streets and architecture on one side, beaches, vegetation, and open space on the other. Both became settings for Deshuk’s continuing observation of people and their relationship to place.
In 1987, Deshuk was an artist in residence at Altos de Chavón in the Dominican Republic. In 1989, she participated in New Narrative: An Artists of the Region Invitational Exhibition at Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, curated by Helen A. Harrison. [4]
The 1980s established many of the ideas and methods Deshuk would continue to explore throughout her career. Photography offered a means of observing and preserving a moment. Painting allowed her to return to it, transform it, and give it another life.
FOOTNOTES
[1] P.S. 122 Gallery, 20 Years at P.S. 122; Hunter College MFA Studio Art alumni records. Archival histories document the development of the former school building into artists’ studios and an artist-run gallery, while Hunter College records Deshuk among its 1984 MFA alumni.
[2] Daria Deshuk, recollections of Club 57 and the Lower East Side, preserved in Robert Carrithers’ photographic archive. Deshuk discusses Club 57, her P.S. 122 studio, and her use of photography and projection in developing her Lower East Side paintings.
[3] “Daria Deshuk Exhibits in Southampton,” The Ukrainian Weekly, June 20, 1982. The contemporary article describes Deshuk’s May exhibition at Inroads Gallery as her first one-woman show and records her participation in the June 19–July 12 exhibition at Tower Gallery in Southampton.
[4] Daria Deshuk, surviving curriculum vitae. The document records her annual studio exhibitions at P.S. 122, her 1987 residency at Altos de Chavón, and her participation in the 1989 New Narrative exhibition at Guild Hall Museum, curated by Helen A. Harrison.