Charles Desmarais

Charles Desmarais (born April 21, 1949) is the Art Critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. An American art scholar and administrator, he is the former president of the San Francisco Art Institute, and has been Director of several art museums.

A native of the Bronx, Desmarais earned a bachelor’s and master's degree from the State University of New York, Buffalo, and was a 1983 participant in the Museum Management Institute (later the Museum Leadership Institute program of the Getty Foundation).

In the 1980s, Desmarais directed the California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside. He was director of the Laguna Art Museum, in Laguna Beach, California from 1988 to 1994. He then served as director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati from 1995 until January 2004. From 2005 to 2011, he was deputy director for art at the Brooklyn Museum, where he oversaw 10 curatorial departments, as well as the museum’s education, exhibitions, conservation and library activities. In 2011 he was appointed president of the San Francisco Art Institute, a position he left in October 2015.

Desmarais was an early patron of some architects who later became prominent. He hired Stanley Saitowitz to design the award-winning California Museum of Photography, which opened in 1989. In 1991, he organized the first major museum exhibition of Morphosis, then the partnership of Michael Rotondi and Thom Mayne, now a Pritzker Prize laureate. Most recently, he commissioned Zaha Hadid to build a new Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, which opened in 2003 and was described in the New York Times as “the most important American building to be completed since the end of the cold war.” The following year, Hadid was the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize.

He has written more than 100 articles, as well as books, and was awarded an Art Critics Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979. Desmarais has curated more than 50 exhibitions on various artists, photographers and architects. His books and exhibition catalogues include:

Since 1985, he has been married to Kitty Morgan, former editor-in-chief of Sunset magazine and now Assistant Managing Editor - Lifestyle Content Director of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The decision to appoint Demarais as San Francisco Chronicle Art critic has been called a disappointment and questioned by members of the California Arts community.