CAA News

In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, architects, photographers, and others whose work has significantly influenced the visual arts. The end of 2012 was marked by the loss of the painter Will Barnet, the architect Oscar Niemeyer, and the museum director Gudmund Vigtel.

• Evelyn Ackerman, a Californian artist and designer who worked in mosaics, tapestries, and wood carving, died on November 28, 2012, at age 88. She often collaborated with her husband, the artist Jerome Ackerman; their work was recognized in a retrospective exhibition, Masters of Mid-Century California Modernism, at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego
• Gae Aulenti, the Italian architect and designer who transformed a Paris train station into the Musée d’Orsay, died on October 31, 2012. She was 84. Aulenti also worked on renovations to museums in Barcelona, Istanbul, San Francisco, and Venice
• Takashi Azumaya, an independent Japanese curator, died on October 16, 2012, at the age of 44. After working at the Setagaya Art Museum and the Mori Art Museum, he became the first non-Korean director of the Busan Biennale, which he organized in 2010
• Will Barnet, a painter and printmaker who lived and worked in New York for many decades, passed away on November 13, 2012. He was 101 years old. Barnet, who won CAA’s 2007 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, had taught at the Art Students League and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, among other schools
• Marshall J. Bouldin III, a portraitist based in Mississippi who painted Richard Nixon’s daughters, died on November 12, 2012. He was 89 years old
• David C. Copley, the former owner and publisher of the San Diego Union-Tribune and a philanthropist of the arts, died on November 20, 2012, at age 60. Copley was a member of board of directors for the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
• Johanna Liesbeth de Kooning, the only daughter of the artist Willem de Kooning and the cofounder of his estate and trust, passed away on November 23, 2012. She was 56 years old
• Robert W. Duemling, the former director of the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, and a board member of the Society of Architectural Historians, died on July 13, 2012, at age 83. Duemling had spent four years in naval intelligence and thirty years in the US Foreign Service after earning his master’s degree in the history of art and architecture from Yale University in 1953
• Jacques Dupin, a French poet and art critic, died on October 27, 2012, at the age of 85. A longtime director of Galerie Maeght in Paris, Dupin wrote the official biography of Joan Miró as well as ten monographs on the artist’s work
• Georgia Fee, the cofounder, chief executive officer, and editor-in-chief of Art Slant, died on December 8, 2012. Born in 1951, Fee developed Art Slant from a Los Angeles–based events calendar and online art magazine into a website with an international scope
• Gray Foy, a New York artist and socialite, passed away on November 23, 2012, at the age of 90. Foy received acclaim for his drawing and illustrations in the mid-twentieth century but became better known as a tastemaker and salonnier, hosting parties and events that boasted attendees as diverse as Leonard Bernstein, Cary Grant, and Susan Sontag
• Krisanne Frost, an artist based in San Antonio, Texas, and gallery liaison for the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, died on December 6, 2012. She was 61 years old
• Wendell Garrett, a historian and an appraiser on the television show Antiques Roadshow, died on November 14, 2012. He was 83. Among Garrett’s books are Victorian America: Classical Romanticism to Gilded Opulence (1993) and American Colonial: Puritan Simplicity to Georgian Grace (1995)
• Richard Gordon, a photographer and a maker of handmade books, died on October 6, 2012, at age 67. Gordon’s most recent collection of images are American Surveillance (2009) and Notes from the Field (2012)
• Rosalie B. Green, director of the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University from 1951 to 1981, passed away on February 24, 2012. She was 94 years old
• Evelyn B. Harrison, a historian of Greek and Roman art and a professor in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University from 1974 to 2006, died on November 3, 2012, at the age of 92. She had previously taught at the University of Cincinnati, Columbia University, and Princeton University
• Alfred Kumalo, a South African photographer who document life under apartheid and the rise of Nelson Mandela, died on October 21, 2012. He was 82 years old
• Glenys Lloyd-Morgan, a Canadian-born archaeologist of ancient Rome, passed away on September 21, 2012, at the age of 67. Raised and educated in England, she worked at the Grosvenor Museum in Chester and as a finds consultant
• Arnaud Maggs, a Canadian photographer who shot portraits of Anne Murray and Leonard Cohen, died on November 17, 2012. He was 86 years old. Magg’s honors include a 2006 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and a 2012 Scotiabank Photography Award
• Margaret M. Martin, a watercolorist based in Allentown, New York, died on November 29, 2012, at the age of 72. Her love of gardening inspired many of her still lifes of flowers
• Menno Meewis, director of the Middelheimmuseum in Antwerp, Belgium, died on October 17, 2012, at age 58. He is credited with rejuvenating the museum and overseeing its expansion
• Patricia Meilman, a scholar of Venetian Renaissance art, died on October 13, 2012. She was 65 years old. Her books include Titian and the Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice and The Cambridge Companion to Titian
• Oscar Niemeyer, the renowned Brazilian architect, died on December 5, 2012, at the age of 104. He is best known for designing the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum and many government, commercial, and residential buildings for Brasília, his country’s new capital
• Catherine Burchfield Parker, an artist who spent thirty years of her career in Buffalo, New York, died on November 6, 2012, at age 85. She was the daughter of the painter Charles Burchfield
• Spain Rodriguez, an influential underground cartoonist based in San Francisco, California, died on November 28, 2012, at age 72. Rodriguez’s work was published by Zap Comics and in the East Village Other
• William Turnbull, a modernist sculptor from Scotland, died on November 15, 2012. He was 90. Turnbull’s career, which spanned seven decades, included forays in figurative, organic semiabstract, and hard-edged geometric styles, as well as painting
• Gudmund Vigtel, director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1963 to 1991, died on October 20, 2012. He was 87. Under his leadership the museum’s collection tripled in size and moved into a Richard Meier–designed building
• Albert Wadle, an art dealer and philanthropist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, died on November 12, 2012. He was 84 years old
• Shizuko Watari, the founder and director of Watari-um, the Watati Museum of Contemporary Art, in Japan, died on December 1, 2012, at age 80. She was also a curator and the director of Galerie Watari in Tokyo
• Larry Welden, an artist and educator based in Sacramento, California, died on October 25, 2012, at age 90. He taught art at Sacramento City College from 1960 to 1985, and his watercolors focused on the landscapes of Northern California
• Evelyn Williams, an English artist whose reliefs, drawings, and paintings were hard to categorize, died on November 14, 2012. She was 83 years old
• Lebbeus Woods, an unconventional architect who built only one permanent structure, died on October 30, 2012. He was 72 years old. Woods was a professor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York.

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the January list.

CAA has awarded grants to the publishers of eighteen books in art history and visual culture through two programs: the Millard Meiss Publication Fund and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant.

Wyeth Grant Recipients

CAA is pleased to announce seven recipients of the annual Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, established in 2005. Thanks to a generous grant from the Wyeth Foundation, these awards are given annually to publishers to support the publication of one or more book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects. For this grant program, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico through 1970.

Receiving 2012 grants are:

• Katherine A. Bussard, Unfamiliar Streets: Photographs by Richard Avedon, Charles Moore, Martha Rosler, and Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Yale University Press
• Melissa Dabakis, The American Corinnes: Women Sculptors and the Eternal City, 1850–1876, Pennsylvania State University Press
• Michael Lobel, Becoming an Artist: John Sloan, the Ashcan School, and Popular Illustration, Yale University Press
• Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America, University of Minnesota Press
• John Ott, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority, Ashgate
• Rachel Sailor, Meaningful Places: Local Landscape Photography in the Nineteenth-Century American West and Its Legacy, University of New Mexico Press
• George E. Thomas, Frank Furness and the Poetry of the Present: Architecture in the Age of the Great Machines, University of Pennsylvania Press

Eligible for the grant are book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.

Meiss Grant Winners

This fall, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of eleven books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.

The grantees for fall 2012 are:

• Paroma Chatterjee, The Living Icon in Medieval Art, Cambridge University Press
• Anthony Colantuono and Steven F. Ostrow, eds., Critical Perspectives on Early Modern Roman Sculpture, Pennsylvania State University Press
• T. J. Demos, Migrations: The Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, Duke University Press
• Jennifer Doyle, Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, Duke University Press
• Dorita Hannah, Event Space: Theatre Architecture and the Historical Avant-Garde, Routledge
• Cara Krmpotich and Laura Peers, This Is Our Life: Haida People, Collections, and International Museums, University of British Columbia Press
• Asa Simon Mittman and Susan M. Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
• Bibiana Obler, Intimate Collaborations: Gender, Craft, and the Emergence of Abstraction, Yale University Press
• Dorothy C. Rowe, After Dada: Marta Hegemann and the Cologne Avant-Garde, Manchester University Press
• Linda Safran, Art and Identity in the Medieval Salento, University of Pennsylvania Press
• Robert Slifkin, Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art, University of California Press

Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.

Image: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts building, built by the American architects Frank Furness and George Hewitt, opened in 1876 (photograph by the Detroit Publishing Company, 1900)

Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art and a former senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), will deliver the keynote address during Convocation at the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. Convocation, which includes the presentation of the 2013 CAA Awards for Distinction, will take place on Wednesday evening, February 13, from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. Free and open to the public, the event will be held in the East Ballroom, on the second floor of the Hilton New York in midtown Manhattan.

Storr joined the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA in 1990, where he has organized solo exhibitions on Elizabeth Murray (2005–6), Max Beckmann (2003), Gerhard Richter (2002), Chuck Close (1998), Tony Smith (1998), and Robert Ryman (1993–94). He also coordinated the Projects series at the museum from 1990 to 2000. More recently, Storr served as commissioner of the 2007 Venice Biennale, which was titled Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense. He was the first American invited to the position.

A painter and a critic, Storr has written on art for Art in America, where he has been a contributing editor since 1981, and for Frieze, where he wrote a regular column from 2004 to 2011. In addition to publishing books on Close and Philip Guston, he has recently completed Intimate Geometries: The Work and Life of Louise Bourgeois (forthcoming).

Storr earned a BA from Swarthmore College in 1972 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. The recipient of numerous grants, awards, and honors, he has lectured at colleges and universities throughout the northeastern United States. Storr began his official academic career in 2002, leaving MoMA to become the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Storr joined Yale in 2006 as dean and was recently reappointed to that position for a second five-year term. He is also professor of painting and printmaking at his school.

Storr has intersected with CAA at various points throughout his career. He has chaired several Annual Conference sessions and has spoken on even more. He served on the Art Journal Editorial Board from 1985 to 1995 and, with the attorney Barbara Hoffman, guest edited two issues on censorship and the visual arts, in fall and winter 1991. A ever-passionate advocate, Storr took up the issue again in 2011, writing a piece in Frieze on the Hide/Seek controversy.

On Tuesday, February 12, a day before Convocation, Storr will participate on a panel, titled “Hands On,” at the New York Studio School in Greenwich Village. Joining him will be the art historians Svetlana Alpers, professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, and David Rosand, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History Emeritus at Columbia University, who will discuss the connections between making art and writing about it. David Cohen, an art critic and the editor of Artcritical.com, will moderate. The event, starting at 6:30 PM, is free and open to the public; seating, however, may be limited.

Image: Robert Storr (photograph by Herbert Lotz)

CAA is pleased to announce this year’s recipients of its International Travel Grant Program, generously funded by the Getty Foundation. Twenty art historians, including professors, curators, and artists who teach art history, will attend the upcoming Annual Conference in New York, taking place February 13–16, 2013. This is the second consecutive year that CAA has received a Getty grant to support the program.

Please read the full article to learn more about the twenty recipients, who come from the Caribbean, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

In addition to covering travel expenses, hotel accommodations, and per diems, the CAA International Travel Grant Program includes conference registration and a one-year CAA membership. At the conference, the twenty recipients will be paired with hosts, who will introduce them to CAA and to specific colleagues who share their interests. CAA is grateful to the National Committee for the History of Art (NCHA) for its generous support in underwriting the hosts’ expenses. Members of CAA’s International Committee have agreed to serve as hosts, along with representatives from NCHA and CAA’s Board of Directors. This year, the program will begin with a one-day preconference for grant recipients and their hosts in New York on February 12.

CAA is delighted by the range of interests and accomplishments of this year’s grant recipients and looks forward to welcoming them in New York.

Image: Ding Ning, a professor and vice dean of the School of Arts at Peking University in China, is a 2013 travel-grant recipient.

CAA is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2013 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award. The winners of both prizes, along with the recipients of ten other Awards for Distinction, will be announced in January and presented during Convocation in New York, in conjunction with the 101st Annual Conference.

The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in any language between September 1, 2011, and August 31, 2012. The four finalists are:

• Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012)
• Mary K. Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012)
• Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–circa 1204 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012)
• J. P. Park, Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012)

The Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship is presented to the author(s) of an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published between September 1, 2011, and August 31, 2012, under the auspices of a museum, library, or collection. The two finalists are:

• Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, eds., Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012)
• Luke Syson with Larry Keith, Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan (London: National Gallery, 2011)

The Barr jury has shortlisted a second Barr Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, or Collections. The two finalists are:

• Joanne Pillsbury, Miriam Doutriaux, Reiko Ishihara-Brito, and Alexandre Tokovinine, eds., Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2012)
• Anne T. Woollett, Yvonne Szafran, and Alan Phenix, Drama and Devotion: Heemskerck’s “Ecce Homo” Altarpiece from Warsaw (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2012)

The presentation of the 2013 Awards for Distinction will take place on Wednesday evening, February 13, 5:30–7:00 PM, at the Hilton New York. The event is free and open to the public. For more information about CAA’s Awards for Distinction, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs and archivist.

The 2012–13 Nominating Committee has announced a slate of six candidates for the annual election of CAA members to serve on the Board of Directors for a four-year term (2013–17). Voting will begin when the webpages for the election, which will include the candidates’ statements, biographies, endorsements, and video presentations, are published in January 2013.

The six candidates are:

• Elizabeth Conner, Artist and Instructor of Studio Art, University of Washington Tacoma
• Constance Cortez, Associate Professor, School of Art, College of Visual and Performing Arts, Texas Tech University
• Jennifer Milam, Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Film Studies, University of Sydney
• Debra Riley Parr, Associate Professor of Art and Design History and Chair of Fashion Studies, Columbia College Chicago
• Sheila Pepe, Acting Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Art and Design, Pratt Institute
• John Richardson, Professor and Chair, Department of Art and Art History, Wayne State University

If you have questions about the Nominating Committee, the candidates, or the voting process, please contact Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison.

In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, architects, photographers, and others whose work has significantly influenced the visual arts. This month was marked by the loss of the conceptual artist Michael Asher, the Belgian abstract painter Raoul De Keyser, the sculptor and activist An Dekker, and the English gallery director Michael Stanley. CAA has published a special obituary of Jeffrey R. Hayes, a professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

• Michael Asher, the trailblazing Los Angeles conceptual artist and beloved CalArts professor, passed away on October 15, 2012. He was 69 years old. Active since the early 1970s, Asher was one of the first artists to engage in institutional critique by altering the norms that define galleries, museums, and schools. His contribution to the 2010 Whitney Biennial, which requested that the museum be free and open for twenty-four-hours, earned him the prestigious Bucksbaum Award
• Bruno Bobak, a Polish-born Canadian “war artist” during the Second World War, passed away on September 24, 2012, at the age of 88. Bobak enlisted in the Canadian Army at the age of 18, making him the youngest soldier to create artwork during the war. His watercolors and drawings were evocative and disturbing, showing the bare reality of life on the front lines
• Melvin Charney, a Montreal-based architect and teacher, died on September 17, 2012. He was 75 years old. Charney created bold public works that blurred the lines between art and architecture, such as the garden for the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the world’s first human-rights monument in Ottawa, Canada. He was also instrumental in establishing the architecture program at the University of Montreal
• Raoul De Keyser, a Belgian abstract painter, died on October 5, 2012. He was 82 years old. In an ever-expanding art world that prizes the brashest statement, De Keyser’s compositions stood out as examples of forceful gentleness, muted and lyrical. Long admired as a “painter’s painter,” he came to greater prominence during the 2000s with a series of major exhibitions in Germany, France, and England. He is represented by David Zwirner in New York
• An Dekker, a socially conscious sculptor of biomorphic forms, died on September 14, 2012, at the age of 80. Dekker was born in the Netherlands and traveled extensively throughout Europe and Africa. Residing in London the 1970s and 1980s, she was a cofounder of the Hackney Flashers’ photography workshop (with her fellow artist Jo Spence, also recently deceased) and the Women’s Graphic Workshop
• Préfète Duffaut, a Haitian muralist and painter, passed away on October 6, 2012, at the age of 89. Duffaut created brilliantly colored murals of imaginary cities for hospitals and churches. His imagery was inspired by the Haitian religion of voodoo and a personal mysticism
• Gilbert Warren Einstein, an art dealer who founded G. W. Einstein Company in New York, passed away on September 21, 2012, at the age of 70. Einstein’s gallery specialized in twentieth-century works on paper, and he was a member of the International Fine Print Dealers Association of America
• Robin Fior, a British graphic designer at the forefront of the 1960s print revolution, died on September 19, 2012. He was 77 years old. Fior made a name for himself as a designer for radical newspapers, such as Black Dwarf and Peace News. He was political to the bone, active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and in later years served as the art director at the left-wing Pluto Press
• Ulrich Franzen, a polarizing German-born architect whose projects exemplified the modernist architecture ethos of “form follows function,” passed away on October 6, 2012. He was 91. Franzen’s most visible project was the skywalks at Hunter College in New York, an enclosed pedestrian walkway connecting the school’s buildings; other prominent commissions included Houston’s Alley Theater in 1968
• Richard Gordon, a photographer and writer based in Berkeley, California, died on October 6, 2012. He was 67 years old. Gordon’s black-and-white street photography followed the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, and Robert Frank. An exhibition devoted to his 1970s photographs of American cities is on view at Gitterman Gallery in New York until November 7, 2012
• Pedro E. Guerrero, a photographer who gained recognition for his dynamic images of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, died on September 13, 2012, at the age of 95. Guerrero’s working relationship with Wright, which began in the late 1930s, led to magazine assignments and book projects. In the 1960s and 1970s he embarked on a new photography series documenting the work and personality of the artists Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson
• Jeffrey R. Hayes, a professor of art history and director of the master’s degree program in liberal studies at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, passed away on June 18, 2012. He was 65 years old. A specialist in outsider art, Hayes wrote several books on the artist Oscar Bluemner. CAA has published a special obituary of Hayes
• Mick Jones, a British illustrator, teacher, and dedicated socialist, died in August 2012 at the age of 68. Jones took part in the Prague Spring of 1968, an experience that revealed to him how art can be a force for social change. Back in England he shared his devotion to politics through community murals and trade-union banners. He spearheaded the Camden Mural Project (1978), which instructed young people in the art of mural painting in public spaces and housing projects
• Jeremy Le Grice, an English painter inspired by the landscape of his native Cornwall, died on August 9, 2012. He was 75. As a young man he studied with the Cornish painter Peter Lanyon and took classes at the Slade School of Art in London. Le Grice’s paintings, a cross between abstraction and representation, have a rough-hewn quality, fitting for an artist who lived for most of his life in close proximity to the sea
• Howard R. Moody, a reverend with a love for radical art and social justice, passed away on September 12, 2012, at the age of 92. For over thirty years Moody was the minister of Judson Memorial Church in New York’s Greenwich Village. No ordinary congregation, the church became famous as an alternative space for experimentation in visual art, theater, and dance; likewise establishing itself as a safe haven for the marginalized poor and drug-addicted inhabitants of the neighborhood
• Harris Savides, a cinematographer who worked closely with young directors, died on October 9, 2012. He was 55 years old. Independent filmmakers depended on Savides’s exacting vision and technical skill to achieve the perfect look for their films. Notable films include Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere (2010) and Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding (2007), both of which benefited from Savides’s moody and poetic atmosphere
• Serge Spitzer, a Romanian-born installation artist whose work addresses the passing of time and collective memory, died on September 9, 2012, at the age of 61. The artist participated in Documenta and the Venice Biennale. One of his best-remembered works was a 2010 installation at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, a labyrinthine network of plastic tubing that evoked earlier forms of communication in the city
• Michael Stanley, the director of Modern Art Oxford, a contemporary art gallery in England, passed away on September 22, 2012. He was 37 years old. As the director of both Modern Art Oxford and the Milton Keynes Gallery, Stanley championed young artists, including Jenny Saville, Phil Collins, and Pawel Althamer. This year he served as a judge for the prestigious Turner Prize
• John Steiger, a Chicago-based illustrator and artist known for his educational drawings, died on September 5, 2012, at the age of 89. A veteran of World War II, Steiger contributed work to Encyclopaedia Britannica Films and the children’s magazine Highlights; he also maintained a separate studio practice as a realist painter
• Albin Trowski, a Polish-born artist and illustrator who made his home in Manchester, England, following World War II, passed away on September 12, 2012. He was 93 years old. A gifted draftsman, Trowski realized charming city scenes and landscapes in watercolor and oil paint
• Rodney Uren, an Australian architect known for his large-scale urban projects, passed away on September 9, 2012, at the age of 63. He was a principal designer at the international design firm Hassell Practice; notable projects include the Olympic Park Station, a majestic, environmentally friendly structure that was built for the Sydney Olympics in 2000

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the November list.

The painter and writer Mira Schor and the sculptor and multimedia artist Janine Antoni will participate in the Annual Artists’ Interviews, taking place in ARTspace during the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. This session will be the thirteenth installment of the popular series, which features two major practicing artists in back-to-back interviews. The talks will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013, from 2:30 to 5:00 PM at the Hilton in New York. Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Georgia, will interview Schor. Klaus Ottmann, director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and curator at large at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, will interview Antoni.

Mira Schor is a painter, writer, and educator who was born in 1950 into a family of artists in Manhattan. Entering her fifth decade as an artist, she has used the medium of painting to address a wide range of issues: language, corporal materiality, feminist politics, art history, and critical theory. She has also worked in artist’s books and sculpture and has a longstanding engagement with works on paper.

As an art writer and editor, Schor works in the belletristic tradition of John Berger and Virginia Woolf, with her essays combining the candor of a village storyteller with the rigor of a critical approach and maverick fearlessness. Her latest book is A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (2009), and she writes regularly about the intersection of art and life for her blog A Year of Positive Thinking.

Schor is based in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Read CAA’s full profile of the artist, which includes more images of her work.

Janine Antoni’s work is an amalgam of shamanistic ritual, quotidian task, and daredevil action. Her performances include using her dye-soaked hair to mop a gallery floor; sleeping in a bed set up in a gallery and then weaving a blanket based on the pattern of her rapid eye movements; and walking across a tightrope of hand-plied hemp that she made herself, suspended eight feet above the ground. The arduous process of the performance is often combined into installations with sculpture, photography, and video. It is Antoni’s desire that her artwork be understood as a felt experience, one that combines emotional content and intellectual engagement. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body.

In a conversation published in 2011 in the Brooklyn Rail, she elaborates on the importance of this imagined relationship with her work’s audience: “When I’m making work I spend a lot of time fantasizing about what the viewer will do and think; I enter their body, and imagine them walking up to my sculpture. My work is a way for me to feel connected and to feel present in the world. I try to make work that elicits empathy. I’ve been known for chewing 600 pounds of chocolate, being dumped in tubs of lard, and mopping the floor with my hair. I do these extreme acts because I feel like it puts the viewer in a very emphatic relationship to my sculpture.”

Antoni lives and works in New York. She participated in the 2011 Annual Conference, speaking on the popular Centennial session “Parallel Practices: When the Mind Isn’t Focused on Art.” Read CAA’s full profile of the artist, with several photographs of her work.

Images

Top: Mira Schor, The Dreams of All of Us, 2012, ink, rabbit skin glue, oil, and gesso on linen, 24 x 28 in. (artwork © Mira Schor; photograph provided by the artist)

Bottom: Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather, 1993, two self-portrait busts: one chocolate and one soap, 24 x 16 x 13 in. (artwork © Janine Antoni; photograph provided by the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)

In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, curators, designers, photographers, filmmakers, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. This month was marked by the loss of the art historian Natalie Boymel Kampen, Magnum photographer Martine Franck, and the young Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy. CAA has published a special obituary for Kampen.

• Lee Wick Dennison, a long-time financial officer for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), passed away on August 31, 2012. She was 60 years old. Dennison joined the NEA in 1975 and campaigned for funding for arts organizations across the country through her various roles as grants officer, assistant director of the challenge and advancement programs, and director of organizational capacity. She received the Distinguished Service Award from the NEA twice, in 1988 and 1999
• Martine Franck, a versatile documentary photographer in the humanist tradition who was among the first women accepted into the elite Magnum photography agency, died on August 16, 2012, at the age of 74. Franck’s images ranged from formal portraits of artists, such as Balthus, to intimate street scenes. She was married to the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Hans Josephsohn, a Swiss figurative sculptor, passed away on August 21, 2012, at the age of 92. His primitive-looking sculptures of reclining figures, heads, and busts on plinths suggest a marriage of classical art and expressionist fervor. He worked primarily in plaster, a material that for him was “a cross between modeling and working with stone”
• Natalie Boymel Kampen, a pioneering feminist scholar and professor of Roman art history and gender studies, died on August 12, 2012. She was 68 years old. Kampen was the author of Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia and Family Fictions in Roman Art and served as chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board from 2009 to 2010. CAA has published a special obituary for Kampen
• Amal Kenawy, an Egyptian artist who showed her video, performance, and installation work in Cairo galleries and in many international biennials, died on August 19, 2012. She was 38. Her diverse artworks dealt with the subject of communication and translation, often to controversial and awe-inspiring effect. The performance Silence of the Sheep, staged at the Cairo Biennial in 2011, featured the artist as a shepherd leading a flock of artists and workers on their hands and knees through the city’s streets
• Joe Kubert, a Polish-born comic-book artist, died on August 12, 2012, at the age of 85. Kubert created many memorable cartoon heroes for DC Comics in the 1940s and 50s, including Sgt. Rock, Hawkman, and Tor, the first 3D comic book. He passed on his passion for drawing and invention at the Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey, founded in 1976 and still going strong today
• Helen Scott Lidgett, a lively British publicist, passed away on July 31, 2012, at the age of 63. Lidgett wore many hats during her varied career: she ran a popular vintage-clothing stall in Camden Town, wrote art criticism for London’s Time Out, and was the famously flamboyant head of publicity for the art-book publishers Thames and Hudson. In later years Lidgett was a champion for arts funding and served as a cultural advisor to Prime Minister Gordon Brown
• William Moggridge, a British designer and educator, died on September 8, 2012, at the age of 69. Moggridge’s invention of the clamshell design of the first laptop computer in 1979 was a revolutionary step for digital technology. He cofounded the product-design firm IDEO and worked on a range of products, from heart defibrillators to Palm Pilots. In 2010 he was named the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York
• Dmitri Plavinsky, a Russian artist associated with the Nonconformist Art movement, passed away on September 1, 2012, at the age of 76. His paintings and etchings explored imagery that flew in the face of officially sanctioned Soviet Realism. Plavinsky was one of a select group of artists to be shown in museums in the United States and in Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Jan Sawka, a Polish-born artist, illustrator, and sculptor known to many outside the art world for his luminous stage sets for Grateful Dead concerts, died on August 9, 2012, at the age of 65. Sawka began his art career working as an underground graphic artist in Krakow, Poland. He has shown his work in museums throughout the United States and in Europe
• Lee Sherry, a New York–based abstract artist, passed away in August 2012 at the age of 65. Sherry attended Reed College with her fellow painter David Reed in the 1960s; she was also close to many writers in the Language school of poetry. Sherry designed the typography for several covers of the experimental poetry journal Roof and showed her work at Susan Caldwell Gallery in New York in the 1970s
• Michael Seward Snow, a British abstract painter who was associated with the St Ives artist colony in the 1950s, passed away on July 15, 2012, at the age of 82. His compatriot artists were Ben Nicholson, Terry Frost, and the poet W. S. Graham. Snow was a professor of art from 1965 to 1985 at Exeter College of Art in Devon, England
• Steve M. Street, a champion for the rights of adjunct faculty members, died on August 17, 2012, at the age of 56. Street had been a non-tenure-track professor of writing at the State University of New York at Buffalo since 1980. He was a frequent contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education on the subject of adjunct benefits and most recently wrote about his own struggle with cancer in light of his adjunct position

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the September list.

In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, curators, designers, photographers, filmmakers, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. This month was marked by the loss of the larger-than-life art critic Robert Hughes, the French filmmaker Chris Marker, the beloved collector Herbert Vogel, the New York painter and professor Denyse Thomasos, and the Austrian sculptor Franz West.

• Jane Barbour, a British researcher of African artifacts and textiles, died on June 14, 2012, at the age of 89. Barbour and her husband, a geographer, lived in different parts of Africa from the 1950s to the 1980s. She edited the volumes Adire Cloth in Nigeria (1971) and Kenyan Pots and Potters (1989)
• Karl Benjamin, a prominent member of the West Coast art scene in the 1950s and 1960s, died on July 26, 2012. He was 86 years old. Benjamin painted in an ordered geometric pattern, dubbed Abstract Classicism by his painting cohort as a response to New York’s Abstract Expressionism. His methodology was informed by many decades as an elementary school art teacher in southern California
• Bram Bogart, a Dutch-born artist who lived in France and Belgium and was known for his heavily layered pigment-and-cement paintings, died on May 2, 2012. He was 90 years old. Associated with the CoBrA art movement in Europe, Bogart exhibited with Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Pierre Soulages, and Karel Appel
• Horacio Coppola, an Argentine photographer active in the avant-garde art scene of Buenos Aires, died on June 18, 2012, at the age of 105. Coppola worked in two modes of black-and-white photography: Surrealist-tinged nocturnal shots of city streets, and stark abstract portraits of objects reminiscent of Bauhaus experiments with the medium
• Stephen Dwoskin, an experimental filmmaker and teacher originally from New York and based in London for over forty years, passed away on June 28, 2012, at age 73. In 1966 he cofounded the London Film-Makers’ Co-op with his fellow filmmaker Jeff Keen (who died in June) and the poet Bob Cobbing. Dwoskin’s films include Chinese Checkers (1964) and Trixi (1969); retrospectives of his work have been held at the British Film Institute in 2009 and at the Arsenal in Berlin in 2010
• Eugene F. Farrell, formerly senior conservation scientist at the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, passed away on March 19, 2012. He was 78 years old. Farrell’s colleague Francesca G. Bewer has written a special obituary for CAA
• Mary Fedden, a British painter of modernist-inflected still lifes, passed away on June 22, 2012, at the age of 96. Her subject matter was domestic life, but her work also made reference to the choices of Cubist painters and Henri Matisse: flattened tabletops, vases, bottles, and flowers. Fedden was the first woman to teach at the Royal College of Art in London, a position she held from 1956 to 1964
• Chris Honey, a British architect and humanitarian, died on June 20, 2012, at the age of 52. Honey’s most significant assignment was the design of the Sanctuary Lakes Resort in Melbourne, Australia. He and his wife Rebecca were supporters of the Oxford-based charity Lifelines that works to abolish the death penalty in the United States
• Marilyn Houlberg, an artist and a scholar of the arts of Haiti and Western Africa, died on June 30, 2012. She was 72 years old. Houlberg was a professor emeritus of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She cocurated the traveling exhibition Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995) and contributed essays to the publications Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World (2005) and Vodou: Visions and Voices of Haiti (1998)
• Robert Hughes, the Australian-born art critic, died on August 6, 2012, at the age of 74. Hughes began writing for Time in 1970, and in 1980 his book and BBC television series The Shock of the New brought his theory of modern art and culture to a wider audience. Hughes was known for his elegant yet fiery critical voice that rattled the genteel art worlds of New York and London
• Georgina Hunt, a British artist known for her luminous, gradient-color paintings, passed away on April 16, 2012. She was 89. Hunt was transformed by her time spent in New York in the early 1970s, where she furthered developed her minimalist approach to painting. Another early influence on her technique was Carl Jung’s theory of the integrated personality
• Sunil Janah, a photojournalist who captured India as it fought against colonial rule to become an independent state in 1947, died on June 21, 2012. He was 96 years old. Working with a rudimentary camera—a Kodak Box Brownie—he photographed Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, as well as moments of ordinary life and mass demonstrations
• Wael Issa Kaston, a Syrian sculptor who worked in wood and mud, has reportedly been killed in Homs under torture by the Syrian government. He was 46 years old, and the news of his death was first announced on July 24, 2012. Kaston’s figurative work dealt with the “freedom of women,” and he described his choice of materials as connected to the elemental life force of the human body
• Bill Komodore, a painter and professor of art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, died on August 3, 2012, at the age of 80. Born in Athens, Greece, Komodore made expressive, lyrical work that engaged the subjects of myth, war, and love. His 2010 exhibition Arcadia: The Recent Paintings was held at the Decorazon Gallery in Dallas
• Chris Marker, the renowned French filmmaker who invented the essay-film and took the medium to new heights of poetry and political force, passed away on July 30, 2012. He was 91. Marker’s best-known films, La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1982), deal with memory, time travel, and human longing. He also worked in photography, video installations, and new media: his last exhibition was a portrait series of anonymous Paris métro riders, called Passengers (2011) at Peter Blum in New York
• Helen Messenger, one half of a flamboyantly bohemian artist couple (her husband was the artist Tony Messenger), died on April 11, 2012, at the age of 77. The Messengers met as students at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London and established an informal salon for new ideas in fashion, art, and lifestyle, in their Notting Hill home in London. Helen was later involved in costume design in the 1960s and 1970s, working for Ossie Clark, Laura Ashley, and, most famously, David Bowie
• Dewey Mosby, a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French art and director emeritus of the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, died on August 1, 2012, at the age of 70. Mosby was the first African American to receive a PhD in art history from Harvard University and also the first African American curator of European art at a major art museum (Detroit Institute of Arts)
• Alvin Nickel, a fabric artist and professor emeritus of art and art history at the University of Texas at Austin, died on August 27, 2011. He was 85 years old. Prior to joining the university in 1960, he worked as a craft director for the United States government in Germany. Nickel created large-scale painterly wall hangings using the dyeing process of batik
• Walter Pichler, a visionary Austrian architect and artist, passed away on July 16, 2012, at the age of 75. Pichler called his architectural plans “dream drawings” and was invested in the narrative possibilities of architecture and design. In later years he moved even further in the direction of fine art with a series of drawings and installations based on his farm in rural Austria
• Jacinto Quirarte, professor emeritus and former dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio, died on July 20, 2012. He was 81 years old. Quirarte specialized in Precolumbian art, Latin American art, and Latino art history. From 1982 to 1987 he chaired the National Task Force on Hispanic Art of the National Endowment for the Arts. His books include The Art and Architecture of the Texas Missions (2002), Izapan-Style Art: A Study of Its Form and Meaning, and Mexican American Artists (both 1973)
• Mary Louise Milligan Rasmuson, a patron of the arts in Alaska, died on July 30, 2012, at the age of 101. She was married to Elmer Rasmuson, chairman of the National Bank of Alaska, and through the Rasmuson Foundation the couple helped to found Alaska’s Anchorage Museum of History and Art in 1968. During World War II and after, she was an ardent campaigner for women’s rights in the military and was named fifth commandment of the Women’s Army Corp in 1957 by President Dwight Eisenhower
• Denise René, a Parisian gallery director and an art collector whose stable of abstract artists included Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, and Piet Mondrian, passed away on July 9, 2012. She was 99. A 1938 meeting with the artist Victor Vasarely in the Café de Flore in Paris ignited her career in dealing art. In 2001 the Pompidou Center in Paris held an exhibition in homage to her cultural impact as a gallerist
• Wayne Roberts, a Bronx-based graffiti artist known by the street moniker Stay High 149, died on June 11, 2012, at the age of 61. Roberts’s heyday was in the 1970s; his work was featured in Norman Mailer’s book The Faith of Graffiti (1973), and he was respected by graffiti aficionados for his easily identifiably tag of a joint-smoking haloed stick figure
• Martin E. Segal, a patron of the arts and a long-time supporter of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, passed away on August 5, 2012. He was 96 years old. Segal was instrumental in setting up the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where he served as chief executive from 1968 to 1978. In his last years he remained a spritely figure in the philanthropic world, always wearing a rose in his lapel at social functions around the city
• Roy Shaw, formerly secretary-general of the Arts Council of Great Britain, died on May 15, 2012, at the age of 93. During his tenure, Shaw sought to make the arts more accessible to the public without consenting to vulgarization and commercialism. He was knighted in 1979 and authored the volume The Arts and the People (1987)
• Jack Simcock, a British painter, died on May 13, 2012, at the age of 82. Simcock’s signature paintings were rich, dark-toned images of the village of Mow Cop in North West England, where he lived and worked from 1958 until his death. He exhibited his work at the Piccadilly Gallery in London and also published an autobiography and a collection of poems
• Jonathan Speirs, an architect who specialized in creatively lighting monumental buildings around the world, passed away on June 18, 2012, at the age of 54. In 1993 Speirs founded the architectural lighting firm Speirs + Major, with Mark Major, and the projects the team worked on include Terminal 5 at the Madrid Barajas International Airport, the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building
• Denyse Thomasos, a painter who created large-scale expressionistic work that referenced urban space, maps, and travel, died on July 19, 2012, at the age of 47. Thomasos was a beloved professor to many art students at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where she taught from 1995 to the present day. Her work is represented by Lennon Weinberg in New York and Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto
• Herbert Vogel, one half of a legendary contemporary art collecting couple, died on July 22, 2012, at the age of 89. Vogel worked as a postal clerk in New York for decades and, with his wife Dorothy, came to collecting from a genuine love of art. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC—the institution that first ignited the couple’s fascination with modern art during a 1962 honeymoon visit—was bequeathed a significant portion of their collection. CAA plans to publish a tribute to Herbert Vogel
• Franz West, the Austrian sculptor of ebullient abstract forms, passed away on July 25, 2012, at the age of 65. West was invested in the functionality of an artwork, bridging the darker currents of the European avant-garde with the lightness and accessibility of Pop art. Recent installations include an outdoor sculpture in New York’s Central Park, called The Ego and the Id (2009)
• George Wyllie, a Scottish sculptor who called himself a “scul?tor” to emphasize the social aspect of his practice, died on May 15, 2012, at the age of 90. Wyllie specialized in outdoor artwork that commented on the decline of industry in his native Glasgow. His best-known pieces are two temporary works, Straw Locomotive, a full-scale reproduction of a train made from straw and chicken wire, and Paper Boat, a vessel that caused a stir when it docked at the harbor of New York’s World Financial Center in 1990

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the September list.