Ms. Vassell gives the art a run for its money and downtown art czar Jeffrey Deitch a guided tour…

Supertouch homegirl and allstar DEITCH GALLERY director NICOLA VASSELL is one of the downtown NYC art scene’s most important operators. This week finds the NEW YORK TIMES dedicating an almost unprecedented amount of ink to profiling the gorgeous young aesthete, one that might just emerge as one of the city’s new powerbrokers when the art world finally rights itself in the coming years (decades?):

A SHAPER OF TALENT FOR A CHANGING ART WORLD
By Felicia R. Lee
February 2, 2009 Source: NYTimes

The wall labels were missing. The inventory needed to be finished. And where was the sign for the shuttle bus to the gallery, a former warehouse west of the Wynwood art district in Miami? Just hours before the opening party for “It Ain’t Fair,” an exhibition of more than 30 emerging artists on the fringe of Art Basel Miami Beach, the glamorous, outsize international art fair held every year in early December, the O.H.W.O.W. gallery (for Our House West of Wynwood) was still strewn with forlorn boxes, the wall stacked with cases of beer that only hinted at the festivities to come.

“No one will ever know,” Nicola Vassell, a director at the Deitch Projects gallery in Manhattan, said of the mess. Her comment was for Kathy Grayson, also a Deitch director and, like Ms. Vassell, one of several curators of “It Ain’t Fair.”

Ms. Vassell, 30, began working as an intern at Deitch in SoHo in 2005, when both optimism and price tags ran high. But by the time “It Ain’t Fair” was poised to open, on Dec. 2, the previous month had easily seen the worst two weeks in the art market in more than a decade. A tumbling stock market and cascading problems on Wall Street had made buyers scarce, as the contemporary art world pondered the impact of broader economic woes. Ms. Vassell, a former model and a Jamaican immigrant, found herself facing the question of how to build a career in a suddenly contracting industry. Click HERE to continue reading…

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