Charles Desmarais

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Charles Desmarais is an art museum curator and director. He is known for his early patronage of now-prominent architects. He hired Stanley Saitowitz to design the award-winning California Museum of Photography, which opened in 1989. In 1991 he organized the first major museum exhibition of the work of Morphosis, the famous partnership of Michael Rotondi and Pritkzer Prize laureate Thom Mayne. Most recently he commissioned Zaha Hadid and led the effort to build a new Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, which, upon its opening in 2003, the New York Times called “the most important American building to be completed since the end of the cold war”; the following year, Hadid was selected as the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

Since 2004 Desmarais has served as Deputy Director for Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where he oversees ten curatorial departments, as well as the museum’s renowned education, exhibitions, conservation, and library activities. He is also Curator at Large for the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, responsible for long-term curatorial and publishing projects. He served as Director of the CAC from 1995 until January 2004. Prior to joining the CAC, Desmarais served as Director of the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, California. In the 1980s, he directed the California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside.

A native of the Bronx, Charles Desmarais earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the State University of New York, Buffalo, and was one of the first participants in the Museum Management Institute program of the J. Paul Getty Trust. He has written more than 100 articles and books and was awarded an Art Critics Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979. In addition to his experience as a museum administrator, Desmarais has curated more than 50 exhibitions of the work of various artists, photographers, and architects. Among his books and exhibition catalogues are Nothing Compared to This: Ambient, Incidental and New Minimal Tendencies in Current Art (2004), Stephan Balkenhol (2000), Jim Dine Photographs (1999), Humongolous: Sculpture and Other Works by Tim Hawkinson (1996), Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph, 1960-1980 (1992), Why I Got into TV and Other Stories: The Art of Ilene Segalove (1990), The Portrait Extended (1980), Michael Bishop (1979) and Roger Mertin: Records 1976-78 (1978).

He also has a distinguished record in arts management consulting, specifically in the area of strategic planning and board development, in association with AEA Consulting and others.

Since 1985 Charles Desmarais has been married to Kitty Morgan, Executive Editor at Better Homes and Gardens magazine.