About Charles Desmarais

Charles Desmarais served as the art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle from 2015 until his retirement in 2020, bringing to daily journalism a career shaped equally by curatorial practice, museum leadership, and editorial work. Over a career spanning five decades, he led institutions including the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside, the Laguna Art Museum, and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, before serving as Deputy Director for Art at the Brooklyn Museum from 2005 to 2011. He was appointed president of the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011, a position he left to join the Chronicle.

His writing has appeared in Art in America, American Art, the Los Angeles Times, Grand Street, Alta, and many other publications. His books and catalogs include Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph, 1960–1980 (Fellows of Contemporary Art), a landmark study of the period, as well as essays in Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981 (MOCA Los Angeles) and Decade by Decade: Twentieth-Century American Photography (Little, Brown). Earlier in his career he served as Associate Editor of Afterimage and Editor of Exposure, and wrote a regular column, “On Art,” for the Riverside Press-Enterprise.

His work has been recognized by, among other honors, a National Endowment for the Arts Art Critics Fellowship (1979) and the Rabkin Prize for Visual Art Journalism (2017).

He lives with his wife, Kitty Morgan, on Sonoma Mountain in Northern California, where he tends an extensive kitchen garden with the same critical attention he once brought to photography.

This bibliography—comprising several hundred reviews, essays, catalog texts, and books—spans more than fifty years of engagement with photography, contemporary art, and the institutions that shape public understanding of the field.