My Amazing Friends, curated by Kim Hastreiter
Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, New York
From February 8th until February 22nd, 2025
On February 8, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York opens My Amazing Friends, an exhibition curated by the legendary Kim Hastreiter. Cultural explorer, troublemaker, connector, original gangster, cofounder of PAPER, AMAZING Unlimited & mother of STUFF, reads her Instagram bio. Hastreiter is a storyteller at heart – she collects culture, lives it, transforms it, and now, she shares it with the world.
A tireless collector, Hastreiter gathers and tells stories – of ideas, moments, and people. As the co-founder of PAPER magazine, she has spent fifty years spotting and championing New York’s creative energy. She calls herself a cultural anthropologist, and it’s hard to disagree. Whether it was hosting Keith Haring in a church basement in the East Village, buying a George Nakashima table with her mother, or exchanging stories with Salvador Dalí over a cocktail at Trader Vic’s, Hastreiter was there. Her new book, STUFF: A New York Life of Cultural Chaos, co-published by AMAZING Unlimited and Damiani Books (2025), encapsulates these mythic tales and the objects that shaped them.
My Amazing Friends channels this compulsion for collecting into a visual experience – a tribute to the people who have marked her life, through works by a gloriously diverse group. Some of the artists in the show are legends, others underground icons, and some are yet to be discovered, but as Hastreiter puts it, they are all “great people and great artists.”
The exhibition shows how life’s chaos weaves a narrative. “Everything you see on the following pages of this book belongs to and lives with me in my home,” says Hastreiter. “Everything you read in this book really happened and lives with me in my heart,” she writes in the opening pages of STUFF. The works on display aren’t just selections from her archive – they are extensions of friendships, artifacts of a life spent in pursuit of the vibrant, the eccentric, and the extraordinary.
The artists in the show bring this unique collection to life. David Byrne describes Hastreiter’s collection as “the remnants of a life well lived.” Maira Kalman calls her “a life force of the highest order.” Pedro Almodóvar muses, “Her enthusiasm makes us feel like better artists than we are.” Jeffrey Deitch, who has collaborated with Kim for twenty-five years, writes: “She has assembled a fascinating trove of art that parallels her influence on downtown culture.”
This isn’t the first time Hastreiter has turned a gallery into a playground. In 2001, in this very same Grand Street space, she staged Antidote to Fashion Week, a raucous happening that involved everything, from fashion wrestling to a barber chair to theremin concerts on the roof.
Two decades after her first curatorial project with Deitch, My Amazing Friends is both a celebration and a manifesto. It’s a reminder that collecting isn’t about hoarding – it’s about storytelling. About honouring the people and moments that shape us, about seeing meaning in the beautiful, bizarre chaos of a life well-lived. As Hastreiter puts it, “I am a fanatical collector and curator of ‘stuff,’ mostly stuff that I think is important, tells a good story, or just makes me swoon.” And perhaps that’s the heart of it all: in an era obsessed with minimalism, she embraces the opposite. She proves that life is best measured not by what we leave behind, but by what and who we choose to hold onto.
