Growing up, my formal art education in high school and college emphasized Renaissance paintings and Old Master paintings–there wasn’t any focus on public art or contemporary art. Seeing public art in Chicago was transformational in terms of how I perceived what art can do and be in the world.

TESS POLLOK: You’re the Managing Director of Artists and Exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch. I’ve been dying to talk with you forever because Jeffrey Deitch is consistently brought up by our readers as one of their favorite galleries, both in NYC and LA. How did you end up at Jeffrey Deitch?

ALIA DAHL: I’ve been working with Jeffrey for about eight years now and I actually met him very early in my career. I had just moved to New York City to attend Sotheby’s Institute’s master’s program in Art Business, having always known that I wanted to be in art but also that I didn’t want to be an artist. I knew that what I wanted to do was support people who couldn’t imagine doing anything else with their life except make art. Moving to New York, I knew that that instinct was going to be the center of my practice. I worked for a few different places in the art world after graduating–I worked at an art PR company, I worked at a public art non-profit for a short period of time, I even worked at an art investment fund. But none of those roles ever felt like quite the right fit. This was all happening the year that Jeffrey Deitch presented the Florine Stettheimer Collapsed Time Salon at the Armory Show. I immediately knew that was an important moment in art history and I had to see it. When I got to the fair, there was only about an hour left, and, I’m not joking, I was laser-focused on seeing Jeffrey’s booth. So, I go to the booth, and there’s Jeffrey himself sitting in the booth. That’s just completely unusual, to have the owner of the gallery there at the booth in person, like, an hour before closing. So I immediately introduced myself and he told me they were looking for help at the gallery and to send him my information. The timing just aligned for me and I ended up working at the gallery a few months later. It was a perfect fit and here I am, eight years later.

POLLOK: Wow! I had no idea you had such an auspicious origin story. That’s genuinely beautiful; a chance encounter led you to this position.

DAHL: Yeah, it was really crazy. Sometimes when I think about it now, I still can’t believe that it happened.

POLLOK: How do you view the distinct curatorial voice of Jeffrey Deitch?

DAHL: That’s a good question. The most obvious would be Jeffrey’s long-standing influence in the art world. He’s someone who’s been interested in marginalized groups for a long time, artists who haven’t gotten nearly the recognition they deserve. Another thing I’ve always admired about Jeffrey’s voice is his focus on pop culture and its relationship to art through fashion, dance, and music. That perspective has definitely affected the type of curatorial projects I’m attracted to and the ideas that I have.

For example, I loved curating the recent Clay Pop exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch LA, which was previously on view at our New York gallery in 2021. That show was really about displaying a legible history of the ceramic community and I was really proud of that. Ceramicists are sometimes put into the craft category versus the fine art category and I was thinking about the friction between those two communities, as well as my personal love of pop culture. As a millennial growing up with programming like the Disney Channel and surrounded by pop music, pop music, tv, and celebrity culture have influenced my approach to curatorial projects and how I integrate contemporary art with pop culture. Working with Jeffrey Deitch has provided me with innumerable points of pride; I am able to connect deeply with the pop culture influences in the works of artists like Austin Lee, Alake Shilling, and Sharif Farrag.

POLLOK: Is there a specific show you’ve curated that you consider your favorite?

DAHL: Clay Pop is my favorite. That show was several years in the making and it was a long time coming both for us and for the artists involved who’d been deep in the ceramics community for a while. It presented us with an opportunity to work with this exciting group of artists who just so happened to love the medium, but didn’t necessarily connect with the craft connotations of being a ceramicist. Everything about that exhibition just speaks to me–including that we connected with Charlap Hyman & Herrero to design this incredible plinth structure that took over the space. We knew it was going to be such a unique show that we didn’t want to go with the conventional presentation of just a sea of pedestals. To this day, people come up to me telling me how important that exhibition was to them.

POLLOK: How do you approach the architectural side of curation? When I’ve been to shows at Jeffrey Deitch, the presentation isn’t what I associate with a typical contemporary art exhibition.

DAHL: My top priority as a curator is that the focus be on the art. That’s a lesson that Jeffrey has taught me, that our gallery is a platform for the artist to do their thing. Whatever we do for the installation, it’s always in support of the artist. We try to be as ambitious with our presentations as we can be within the practical and budget constraints of being a commercial gallery. So, if an artist has an ambitious idea about how the work should be presented, we always try to support that idea and go all the way.

POLLOK: I think a paradox of curation that really interests me is that you want the focus to be on the art but sometimes to make that happen you have to create a space that is, like, the exact opposite of the conventional gallery space–a blank white room with blank white walls filled with objects. People just get so used to that presentation that “focusing on the work” sometimes necessitates making more divisive choices about the presentation, choices people could criticize as distracting.

DAHL: Completely. What I love the most about our spaces, architecturally, is that there’s so much history in them. Most of our galleries have former lives. One of our New York galleries used to be a lumber company where they would cut logs for lumber, so our elevated platform was the area where logs were stored. Our Grand Street location used to be a manufacturing company that made curtains for theater houses. It has beautiful high ceilings and a lot of skylights. Natural light is extremely important to us. I feel that you can feel the history when you walk into these spaces and artists are extremely excited by it because they’re not walking into these entirely clinical spaces that feel entirely devoid of character.

POLLOK: Who are some of your favorite artists, personally? Do you have any favorite works of art that you’ve seen recently, or that significantly influenced you on your journey as a curator?

DAHL: [Laughs] That’s too hard! Oh my god, I don’t know. First of all, I would have to say I love the work of all the artists I work with. I grew up in Chicago and that’s where most of my formative memories of encountering public art are, for example, the Picasso sculpture in downtown Chicago sticks out in my mind as one of my first encounters with affecting public art. The Alexander Calder Flamingo also stands out in my mind. Growing up, my formal art education in high school and college emphasized Renaissance paintings and Old Master paintings–there wasn’t any focus on public art or contemporary art. Seeing public art in Chicago was transformational in terms of how I perceived what art can do and be in the world.

POLLOK: That’s funny, Calder was also transformative for me when I was growing up. There was a show, “Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic” at LACMA when I was growing up and my dad made me go. For obvious dad reasons, his insistence that I experience culture, even though I was a moody tween and just wanted to stay home and play my Nintendo DS.

DAHL: That’s such a dad thing to do.

POLLOK: What do you bring to Jeffrey Deitch that makes your curation unique?

DAHL: That’s also a really good question. I think that every curator shares a passion for art but one thing I like doing is incorporating elements of my other passions and interests into my curation. So, my interest in the world of fashion, my interest in the world of ballet–these things all express themselves in how I make choices with the world I’m creating. One thing that’s really important to me as a curator is just being extremely collaborative with the artist I’m working with. I know that I don’t know everything. I know that I’m not aware of every artist that’s working today. So I’m always open to hearing from artists about opportunities I might be missing to connect the work to relevant themes or people. I rely on the incredible community of artists we’ve built at Jeffrey Deitch to offer recommendations where they’ll say things, like, “Hey, this is a friend of mine, would you want to visit their studio? It’s around the corner from mine.” And that’s, I think, where a lot of my inspiration as a curator comes from because without input from our artist community, the newer artists that I’m working with wouldn’t necessarily even be on my radar. That also goes for my other friends who are gallerists and who sometimes are, like, “Hey, this person should be on your radar.” I find being collaborative is very rewarding.

POLLOK: What’s the most difficult or frustrating thing about being a curator?

DAHL: Sometimes you’re excited about a particular type of work or project, but you simply don’t have the funds to see it to fruition. There’ll be a work that you love that ends up being halfway across the world and you’re looking at it being hundreds of thousands of dollars in shipping for an eight week exhibition, which just doesn’t make sense. Or, like, sometimes you’ll be excited to invite an artist with amazing work to participate in an exhibition but they simply don’t have the time to make something. Or they don’t have any existing inventory available so they can’t participate. It can be frustrating when an artist feels like you intentionally didn’t include them, because typically we are trying to make as strong of an exhibition as possible, but are working within a specific timeline and budget that might not allow for everyone to be included. It’s unfortunate when people’s perspectives lean towards the negative, for whatever reason it is, because it can feel accusatory–it’s usually not intentional when someone or something is left out of a show. Sometimes these decisions are out of your control, even as the curator.

POLLOK: I feel your pain running an independent magazine. I’m always, like, how many people do you think work here?

DAHL: [Laughs] Exactly! I bet you get comments all the time about how you snubbed so-and-so. But it’s always, like, hey, I’m just trying my best.

POLLOK: At our size, I try to take it as a compliment. I’m, like, hey, this is kind of cool, they think we can snub! Are there any trends you’ve been seeing in contemporary art lately that you really like?

DAHL: Working in contemporary art, you always see things cycle in and out of fashion. For several years, there has been a huge emphasis on figuration and female figurative artists, Black figurative artists, Asian-American figurative artists. Recently, I have been excited by the new generation of artists working in abstraction, which has inspired a group exhibition I am curating in Los Angeles entitled The Abstract Future. It’s a trend that I’m noticing coming to a head this year. There is an interesting dialogue with abstraction in the art world, as seen in museum exhibitions like MoMA’s Jack Whitten: The Messenger and their upcoming show Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction. What’s particularly interesting to me about the new generation is that they’re not limiting themselves to the traditions of abstraction. If you think about someone like Frank Stella, so much of that work focused on exploring space and line and color, the relationship between the work and the space. I think that artists of today are exploring these things as well as incorporating their personal histories more and involving more explorations of technology, space, and culture. It feels like the idea of abstraction is somehow becoming even more abstract, which I love.

POLLOK: What makes you most excited about your upcoming show?

DAHL: A lot of these artists have never shown in LA before, so it’s really exciting to be able to bring them to a whole new audience. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a show quite like this in LA before–at least, I haven’t heard of a comprehensive group exhibition of abstract artists presented since we opened our Los Angeles gallery in 2018. In addition to the New York and Los Angeles artists, a lot of the artists involved are from Europe and then some of them are from the Midwest. Maybe our show will inspire someone to start supporting these artists and building a collection of this type of work. That’s the hope.

ALIA DAHL is the Managing Director of Artists and Exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch. Her next curated exhibition, The Abstract Future, opens at Jeffrey Deitch LA on May 16, 2025.

TESS POLLOK is a writer and the editor of Animal Blood.