[5] Studying with Keith Haring, he became close friends with the artist became immersed in the artsy downtown scene of New York, as La Placa described in an interview with the Mayfair Art Weekend as "living in the Renaissance".
[7][8][9] In 1980 Joe La Placa worked for the gallery Sperone Westwater with key members of the Italian Transavantgarde such as Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and Sandro Chia.
Over the next few years the gallery worked with and represented many notable artists of the graffiti / "writing" genre, including Phase 2[note 3], Delta, Sharp, Rammellzee, ERO (Dominique Philbert), and Lee Quiñones.
[26][27] In 2007, still in London, Joe La Placa joined forces with hedge fund billionaire Mike Platt, former J.P. Morgan Managing Director,[28] to establish All Visual Arts.
The "Age of the Marvelous" show that took place in 2009 in the crypt of a deconsecrated house of worship (former Holy Trinity Church) in central London serves as an example, though the show was marked by its "visual shocks" ("not for children" according to Godfrey Barker, arts reviewer of the London Evening Standard), due to works which included a gorilla mounted on a crucifix[27]—none of which has detracted from the generally positive attention AVA has received, nor from a certain sense of inspiration about its mission.
In interviews at the "Age of the Marvelous" opening Joe La Placa described AVA's approach as harking back to a "late 16th, early 17th Century method of collecting," an ambition of which was to provide "an almost cosmological view into man's knowledge in one room."