Kim Hastreiter's Amazing, Wildly Artistic Friend Group

February 12, 2025

A cultural soothsayer, art and design collector and iconic magazine editor, Hastreiter launched her new book STUFF: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos with a special exhibition called “My Amazing Friends” at Jeffrey Deitch’s gallery. All of New York showed up reports JANET MERCEL

The line snakes around the block from Jeffrey Deitch Gallery for two corners, fortunately before the New York skies would dump several heavy inches of wet snow on us. People are stacked three deep, but no one seems remotely miffed. They are there for “My Amazing Friends,” the companion exhibition for the launch of Kim Hastreiter’s book, STUFF: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos, and they are willing to wait.

The book is a monster, 450 pages with over 1,400 images, stuffed with 50 years of Hastreiter’s life as a cultural anthropologist, Paper magazine co-founder, troublemaker, punk, and yes, friend—to everyone, apparently. Rock-star photographer Dustin Pittman sweeps out the door just as I head in, and the crush swells from there, among them Jerry Saltz, Mickey Boardman, Wendy Goodman, and artists like Ron Finley—one of more than 60+ creatives in the show and the book, aged 87 to Gen Z.

The crowd is no surprise, given that the filmmakers, artists, performers, taggers, writers, bakers, and photographers featured include Pedro Almodóvar, David Byrne, Alba and Francesco Clemente, Shepard Fairey, Phyllis Diller, Kenny Scharf, KAWS, Stephen Sprouse, Paige Powell, and John Waters. Judi Wong from The Odeon has come out for her friend, a fixture of the restaurant’s scene from the start. Kim was there when the McNally brothers and Lynn Wagenknecht opened in 1980, dining nightly for free after striking an ad barter when she launched Paper a few years later. Judi remembers, “When I moved here and managed the Bowery Bar in ’97, she wrote me a letter of recommendation for my Green Card!”

“I’ve never been just one thing. I’m not fashion, I’m not art, I’m not a journalist. People never knew where to put me. But I always introduced everyone, I get everybody together. Everything I do, my whole career, I brought things to life.” – Kim Hastreiter

At 9:30 PM the next night, Jeffrey Deitch calls unannounced while I am in the bubble bath. (In a near overdose of iconic ‘80s culture, I’d seen him at Superhouse on Friday, discussing Why Can’t I Have Fun All Day?, an exhibition for graphic artist Dan Friedman.) His first project with his longtime collaborator was in the same Grand Street gallery where the book party took place—25 years ago on September 8, 2001. Meeting Kim in the 80s, he recalls, was an organic, fluid experience. “What made New York City so special then is that almost every major artist in the vanguard lived downtown. Everyone could walk to see each other. Now with the internet, it’s much more global and dispersed.” And when was the last time I’d seen such a wildly diverse crowd—“from teenagers to people in their 90s”—taking in such a remarkable group featuring illustrators, musicians, ad-world creatives, lighting designers, film directors, and “hardcore conceptual intellectuals”? It was Kim’s expansive view of art, he says, behind Saturday’s all-but-lost mix.

“Jeffrey’s my enabler. I’m an outsider of everything,” says the woman herself, recently awarded as a Cooper Hewitt Design Visionary. (“It’s not normal! I’m not in the design world!”) It’s late Monday evening—me, in the bathtub again; her, home with a bowl of popcorn. “I’ve never been just one thing. I’m not fashion, I’m not art, I’m not a journalist. People never knew where to put me. But I always introduced everyone, I get everybody together. Everything I do, my whole career, I brought things to life.”

All the work in My Amazing Friends represents an important person in Kim’s life—and it’s a lot of life. There’s Kenny Scharf, (“He worked for me!”). Pedro Almodóvar, (“No one knows he takes photos!”). The show is a replica of an expansive personal collection in her apartment, which she talks about like a literal representation of the artists as people. “I don’t hang anything near someone else I don’t think they’ll love.”

Talking to Kim, the connective dots seem infinite, and she remembers everyone. Our editor-in-chief, Avenue’s Peter Davis: “I was his mentor when he was probably 16, in high school and had green hair.” Or my ex-husband, the hairdresser Ric Pipino: “He used to cut my mother’s hair. We’ve been friends through all his wives and girlfriends.” Kim, Ric tells me, was “the start of that whole downtown scene. She’s the loveliest person in the world. And David Hershkovits [Paper’s co-founder], too. But I used to cut her hair uptown.”

After the gallery opening, Joey Arias, her old pal, performed at the My Amazing Soup [after] Party, a continuation of her legendary themed dinners. My friend Fel Cassiel, the lingerie-model-turned-bread-baker of Crispy Heaven on Lafayette, made the baguettes for over a hundred people and heated the dozen-odd soups from some of the city’s most beloved restaurants. “It was snowing. There was cake, there was music, just all the best people,” Kim says. “And Michael Stipe said it was the best party he’d ever been to.”