Joe La Placa is an American art dealer in London. A gallerist, writer and arts organization innovator, La Placa first became noted in the 1980s as a promoter and exhibitor of graffiti, especially as co-founder of the Gallozzi-La Placa Gallery with Guillaume Gallozzi. The gallery worked with leading graffiti artists. The focus of the gallery later diversified into presenting other visual art movements, including Italian Futurists, the Hudson River School, and British surrealists. La Placa spent some years as Foreign Editor for ArtReview and as the chief London representative and writer for Artnet, the online art auctions company. In 2007, with hedge fund mogul Mike Platt, head of BlueCrest Capital Management, La Placa co-founded All Visual Arts a London-based gallery and arts patronage organization capitalized by the hedge fund and considered by some reviewers to represent a new direction in how visual arts are produced and represented.
1980s: from fabricator to dealer
La Placa started out in New York as an artist and then, perhaps because of a more scientific or technical mindset, which he himself attributed in later interviews to the influence of his family, he migrated toward fabrication. In 1983 La Placa, in partnership with French gallerist Guillaume Gallozzi, established the Gallozzi-La Placa Gallery in New York's TriBeCa. Over the next few years the gallery worked with and represented many notable artists of the graffiti / "writing" genre, including Phase 2, Delta, Sharp, Rammellzee and Lee Quiñones. A photo spread and article on Gallozzi-La Placa Gallery, in Italian Vogue magazine from 1984, showed the partners standing inside a loft style studio surrounded by graffiti works in progress, sending the message that the gallerists were part of the scene, not just on the exhibitor side, but on the production side as well. Gallozzi and La Placa also excelled in marketing, and had a successful visit to the prestigious Basel Art Fair in 1984, a graffiti marketing coup that gained them respect—and clients—in Europe. La Placa later wrote: "Invited to mount an exhibition at the Basel Art Fair of 1984, my partner Guillaume Gallozzi and I sold 72 paintings and 40 drawings in three days. An ironic outcome, given that we flew to Switzerland with $50 between us and left with over $250,000, much of it in cash." In addition to graffiti, from 1985 on the gallery started showing Italian Futurists, the Hudson River school and British artists as well. The gallery was operational until the late 1980s, after which La Placa moved to France and worked in IT for about four years. In the early 1990s, motivated by a desire to get back into art, he relocated to London, where he dealt in British modernists, years he described as being difficult. He became the foreign editor for Art Review and also, still in London, which was now becoming more prominent as the hub for contemporary art, he wrote for Artnet. In the meantime his former partner Guillaume Gallozzi had died in 1995 in Paris, aged 37.
Gallerist as producer and patron
In 2007, still in London, Joe La Placa joined forces with hedge fund billionaire Mike Platt, former J.P. Morgan Managing Director, to establish All Visual Arts. From its inception AVA represented an attempt to build a new type of arts organization. According to reports the enterprise was initially funded by £5 million from Platt's hedge fund, with the idea of creating a "hybrid" gallery and patronage organization that would commission works from known artists: the gallery as producer and collector. AVA has been widely reviewed and its initial exhibitions were considered successes. The "Age of the Marvelous" show that took place in 2009 in the crypt of a deconsecrated house of worship in central London serves as an example, though the show was marked by its "visual shocks", due to works which included a gorilla mounted on a crucifix—none of which has detracted from the generally positive attention AVA has received, nor from a certain sense of inspiration about its mission. In interviews at the "Age of the Marvelous" opening Joe La Placa described AVA's approach as harking back to a "late 16th, early 17th Century method of collecting," an ambition of which was to provide "an almost cosmological view into man's knowledge in one room." He described AVA itself as "a new hybrid model for the production of art, which doesn't lock us into a sort of normal gallery system where you have a gallery, a shop," adding "I'm not interested in being a shop owner, I'm interested in producing art." AVA is currently located at 1 Horse Guards Avenue, in the Whitehall area of London.
