Edit DeAk , Critic & Curator for the Undercovered – (1950–2017)
Art critic Edit deAk has died. Doyenne of a downtown New York art world that was the playground for many a nascent movement and ideology—punk, Pictures, New Wave, No Wave, and postmodernism—DeAk wrote for Artforum, Interview, ZG, and Art Random, among other publications. She was also, perhaps most famously, the cofounder—with artist-critic Walter Robinson and writer Joshua Cohn—of Art-Rite, an art periodical published from 1973 to 1978. Artists such as Alan Vega (of the band Suicide), Dorothea Rockburne, Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Pat Steir, and Rosemary Mayer designed covers for the paper.
New York City Ballet dancer Ulrik Trojaborg, artist/critic Edit DeAk, and art luminary Andy Warhol discussing Polaroids at The Odeon, 1986.
Edit DeAK 
Ms. DeAk founded Art-Rite in 1973 with Walter Robinson and Joshua Cohn, two fellow students at Columbia University. Its stated goal was to provide “coverage of the undercovered.”
Continue reading the main storyAttuned to the emerging alternative galleries and performance spaces in downtown Manhattan, the journal, published out of Ms. DeAk’s SoHo loft, turned the spotlight on art at the margins: performance art, video art, conceptual art and outsider art. She had a special affection for street art, which she once called “information from the middle of the night.”
Ms. DeAk’s critical style was personal, quirky and inventive, with adjectives like “nuancical” popping up unexpectedly.
Vito Acconci arranging cushions for PersonA, curated by Edit deAk, April 1974
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Vito Acconci – previous post