While anyone in the art world worth their salt knows Kathy Grayson the director of downtown powerhouse gallery Deitch Projects, only a select few know Kathy Grayson the painter. But from mid-December through January, her work will be included in “Bitten!”, a group show at Kim Light Gallery, Los Angeles.

Grayson’s rocket-powered career began in 2003 when she collaborated with artist Scott Hug on his K48 Klubhouse show. Over the next four years, her name became synonymous with a coterie of hard-partying, widely publicized downtown types—her 2005 book Live Through This, a mashup of essays, art, and party pictures, reads like a yellowpages of cool. The shows she curates independently and through Deitch are mostly bright, crass, and intentionally messy, even when she’s drawing on multi-million-dollar collections. This past summer’s “Panic Room,” with works from the holdings of major collector Dakis Joannou, was a watershed moment for Grayson: as she says, “the oldest curmudgeon at Art Forum loved it.” It’s no surprise that the rear guard is coming around to Grayson’s aesthetic—the prices younger artists now command couldn’t have been ignored for long, and it’s a phenomenon that she helped create. “I’m not the best business person,” she says, “but art can’t exist in a vacuum. You need to convince people that it’s worthwhile, and that comes with the validation of money.”

“Bitten!”, which will mark the first time Grayson’s painting has been shown publicly, came about when Kim Light asked Grayson who would be in her dream group show. She chose artists whose work concerns pixels and 8-bit culture, similar to her own style of figuration with Nintendo nods. And where does she find the time to curate and paint with a full-time job on top? “If it’s fun,” she says, “you never get tired.”