Diego Cortez, who has died aged 74, was a linchpin of the New York underground in the 1980s, and instrumental in the career of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 1978 he co-founded the Mudd Club, a multistorey venue of exposed brick and shabby red velvet furniture in a downtown area considered a no-go zone. Yet what People magazine described as the “punks, posers and the ultra-hip” of the city turned up: the B-52s played the opening night and the Ramones and Talking Heads followed. Its atmosphere was captured by Frank Zappa in his 1981 song titled after the club: “They’re really dancin’, they’re on auto-destruct / On the floor, on the pipe, bouncin’ off-a the wall.”
It was on the Mudd Club’s sweaty dancefloor that Cortez met a young Basquiat, then spraying his spiky, pictorial graffiti under the moniker SAMO across the Lower East Side. “He looked very unusual; a black guy with a blond Mohawk and he was dancing beautifully,” Cortez recalled. “We were friends for almost a year until I saw his SAMO graffiti. I then realised that he was a visual art genius. This work was incredible. As he was always broke I asked him to make some paintings and drawings so he could begin to make some money from his art. I could help him do that.”
Cortez included Basquiat in New York/New Wave, a sprawling group show of more than 100 artists that he curated at PS1 in Long Island in 1981, which connected the downtown New York punk scene with the art world. It’s now considered an era-defining event. Among the musicians, graffiti artists, young painters and poets whose work was hung from floor to ceiling were many soon-to-be stars, including Kathy Acker, David Byrne and Larry Clark, as well as big names such as Lawrence Weiner, William Burroughs and Andy Warhol.
Cortez described New York/New Wave as a “sociology of a scene”, telling a bemused reporter that “I don’t think all of them are professionals right now, but I haven’t really worried about the word ‘professional’. What’s a professional? Were most of the musicians who made most of the good music of the last four years, who comprised punk and new wave, professionals?”
In his review for the Village Voice, the critic Peter Schjeldahl admitted: “I would not have suspected from SAMO’s generally grotty defacements of my neighbourhood the graphic and painterly talents revealed here.”
Cortez’s success with both the Mudd Club and New York/New Wave brought him offers from the mainstream: Madonna, then dating Basquiat, is said to have invited Cortez to be her manager, and later, Larry Gagosian offered him a directorship at his gallery. He declined both. “If you are mostly interested in the politics of the art world, the artist’s persona, or the art market, you will find yourself distracted from the essentials,” he said. “These things mean little to me. But they obviously mean a lot to other people.”
Instead Cortez invested his energy in Basquiat, encouraging the graffiti artist to embrace paint and canvas, and facilitating meetings first with the New York gallery Annina Nosei, who provided the artist studio space in her basement, and then the influential Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger. Cortez himself curated shows for Basquiat at Galleria Mazzoli in Modena in 1981 and Fun Gallery in New York the following year. For all Cortez’s lack of interest in money, there was a lot to be made: by the middle of the decade Basquiat was earning $1.4m a year from his work, and Cortez took his cut.
Cortez was born James Allan Curtis, to Jean (nee Ham), a manicurist, and Allan Curtis, a manager in a steel company, in Geneva, Illinois; he grew up in nearby Wheaton. After attending Illinois State University in 1971 he took a master’s degree under Nam June Paik and Kenneth Anger at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. There he became immersed in the local Latino culture and, a week before leaving for New York in 1973, he changed his name.
He took a studio in Brooklyn, paying the rent by assisting the artists Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci, before moving to SoHo and working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art. “Just in my block there were scores of incredible artists and musicians,” he recalled. “The whole scene was very raw.” The musician Laurie Anderson recorded Time to Go (For Diego), a 1977 spoken-word composition inspired by Cortez’s job.
Music and anarchist politics interested Cortez as much as art. In 1977 he organised a series of rock festivals in Italy, while also managing young bands. While in Europe he met a man who claimed to be a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, and interviewed him for X, a DIY magazine published by Colab, an artist collective Cortez had helped found back in Manhattan. Through Colab, Cortez became involved in the journal Semiotext(e), raising funds and designing an issue that its editor, Sylvère Lotringer, described as “neo-terrorist” in outlook. More publicly palatable was a photobook, Private Elvis (1978), from a chance find of a cache of photographs of Elvis Presley from his army days in a West German junk shop.
After Basquiat’s death in 1988, Cortez helped his family manage his legacy, as well as authenticating work when it came up for auction. “He had a short but full working career,” Cortez said of his protege. “You see all these different periods and styles that would normally take place over 30 or 40 years of an artist’s life but with him it was just in seven or eight years.” In 1996, when the film-maker Julian Schnabel made the biopic Basquiat, Cortez was called on to help.
Throughout the 90s and into the new millennium Cortez staged innumerable solo exhibitions for other artists, including of Schnabel’s paintings, and photography by Gregory Crewdson, Catherine Opie and Richard Prince, as well as working as an adviser to art collectors. “I have worked with many artists at the beginning of their careers – Shirin Neshat, Ellen Gallagher, Robert Mapplethorpe,” Cortez said, “but Jean-Michel became the most famous so I’m more defined by that particular work relationship.” In 2017 he helped recreate Basquiat’s contribution to New York/New Wave for a posthumous retrospective at the Barbican in London.
His interest in the crossover between music and art never waned and in 2010 he curated an exhibition of Patti Smith’s art at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where he was consulting curator for photography.
Cortez produced two albums of his own. Stuzzicadenti (2010) features 15 tracks of avant-garde piano-based compositions, assisted by his friends Ryuichi Sakamoto and Arto Lindsay. The latter returned for Traumdeutung (2014), which features recordings of Cortez snoring, mixed to a bossa nova drum rhythm.
Cortez is survived by his sisters, Kathy and Carol, and a brother, Daniel.
Diego Cortez, curator and musician, born 30 September 1946; died 21 June 2021
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