In Memoriam: Remembering Those the Art World Has Lost in the Coronavirus Pandemic [UPDATED]

As the coronavirus takes lives around the globe, Artnet News
is memorializing those in the art and cultural worlds who have died
in the pandemic. Here are some of their stories. This list
will be continually updated, with the latest obituaries at the
top.

Artist Rafael Leonardo Black, 71, who had his first New
York solo show at the age of 64, died on May 15. The
artist, who was born in Aruba, moved to the US when he was 17, and
later attended Columbia University before dropping out his senior
year. Drawn to the counter-culture scene, he made illustrations
for Crawdaddy, a rock music magazine, that drew on
Surrealist and Symbolist imagery. The new York art dealer Francis
Naumann hosted Black’s first solo show, titled “Insider Art,” in
2013. Reviewing the exhibition, New York Times critic
Holland Cotter wrote that it “stays in the mind long after
you’ve left the gallery.” (Francis Naumann)

Concretist artist Abraham Palatnik, 92, who pioneered
abstraction in Brazil, died on May 9. As a part of
the Grupo Frente movement in the 1950s and ’60s, Palatnik,
along with artists such as Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticica,
ushered in a new era of kinetic-based abstraction, embracing and
developing on international modernist trends. At the height of his
fame, Palatnik was included in eight of ten consecutive São
Paulo biennials, and was praised by the influential
critic Mário Pedrosa for creating sculptures that were
like “frescoes of light.” (ARTnews)

Researcher Motoko Fujishiro Huthwaite, 92,
one of the Monuments Women who protected cultural heritage after
World War II, died on May 4. Huthwaite, who was
born in the US but was sent to Japan after the bombing of Pearl
Harbor, was tasked with cataloguing and inventorying artworks and
artifacts in the Pacific Theater after the war. As a bilingual
speaker, she was uniquely equipped to translate between the
American military and Japanese sources. In 2015, she was awarded
the Congressional Gold Medal. (New York Times)

Curator and art historian Germano Celant, 80, who coined
the term “Arte Povera,” died on April 21. Celant a
towering figure in the art world, launched his career in 1967 with
the publication of his Arte Povera manifesto, “Notes for a Guerilla
War,” in Flash Art magazine, where he championed the work
of artists who made “poor art, committed to contingency, to events,
to the non-historical, to the present.” Since then, he curated the
Venice Biennale, held roles at the Guggenheim, and served as
artistic director of the Prada Foundation in Milan.
(Read the full Artnet News
obituary.)

Painter David Leverett, 82, whose abstract works
were filtered through his fascination with the environment, died on
April 20. Throughout his career, Leverett was
included in dozens of exhibitions at institutions including the ICA
and the Serpentine Gallery in London. He once described
himself as being preoccupied with the landscape, “partly to affirm
our identity within the world we inhabit, and partly to draw
attention to the remarkable dynamics of the natural environment on
which we depend.” The Tate in London holds nearly 30 of his works
from the 1970s. (Camden New Journal)

Historian of African American art and culture Pellom
McDaniels III, 52, who retired from the NFL to focus on
scholarship, died on April 19. McDaniels, who was the
curator of African American Collections at Emory University’s rare
book library, played as an NFL lineman in the 1990s before earning
a PhD and publishing books on subjects ranging from photography and
masculinity in World War I to early black sporting pioneers. He
organized more than a dozen exhibitions for Emory, including one on
the art and activism of artist Camille Billops. (Press release)

Lawyer David Toren, 94, who engaged in a determined
quest to recover art looted from his family by the Nazis, died on
April 19. As a 14-year-old, Toren took the last
Kindertransport evacuation out of Germany before World War II broke
out, and never saw his parents again. Eventually, he moved to New
York and became a patent lawyer. In his final years, he earned
international attention for his efforts to recover his family’s
art, including Max Liebermann’s Two Riders on the Beach,
which surfaced in the collection of Cornelius Gurlitt. One of his
cases against Germany and the state of Bavaria, first filed in
2014, is still pending. (New York
Times)

Photographer John Pfahl, 81, whose manipulated images
were a riposte to nature photography, died on
April 15. The artist, who studied at Syracuse
University, earned his reputation through photographs that
emphasized the strange beauty of power plants and rotting fruit,
and images that parodied the works of Ansel Adams and other nature
photographers. In one image, titled Triangle, Bermuda, August
1975, Pfahl depicted a triangular line of string leading out
into the ocean. “He was showing us that while we believe in a
picture, it looks real, it looks normal, but it’s actually false,”
said curator Lisa Hostetler. (New York Times)

Scholar William Gerdts, 91, an expert on American
art, died on April 14. Gerdts wrote more than 20
books on the subject, including the three-volume tome Art
Across America: Two Centuries of Regional Painting 1710–1920.
A former curator of painting and sculpture at the Newark Museum, he
was a sought-after expert on American Impressionism and
19th-century still-life painting (as well as a collector of the
latter). In 2018, he donated works from his personal library of
American art, as well as paintings and drawings, to the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. (Culturegrrl)

Animator Ann Sullivan, 91, who worked on Disney
Renaissance films such as The Little Mermaid, died on
April 13. Sullivan, who grew up in Fargo, North
Dakota, first worked in Disney’s animation paint labs in the 1950s
before moving to Hanna-Barbera, the studio behind
Scooby-Doo and The Jetsons. She returned to
Disney to work on films including The Lion
King and adopted digital animation techniques in the late
1990s before retiring in the early 2000s. “All she ever wanted
to do was work at the Walt Disney Studios, and she
did,” Motion Picture and Television Fund CEO Bob Beitcher
said in a statement. (Deadline)

Artist and art-supply entrepreneur
Norman Gulamerian, 92, who turned his passion for art into a
successful business, died on April 13. The
Brooklyn-born artist left high school to join the Navy when he was
18 and later returned to study painting at Brooklyn College. When
he struggled to find linen for his canvases, he and his brother
decided to start an art-supply business out of their Brooklyn
basement in 1949. It grew into Utrecht Art Supply Corp., a
well-known chain from New York to California. (New York
Times)

New York graffiti artist Nic 707, 60, who brought street
art back to the subways in the late 1980s, died on April
12. Born Fernando Miteff in Buenos Aires, the
artist made his name by reviving the genre some years after New
York officials cleaned up the city’s early subway art scene.
Instead of creating large-scale murals on the exterior of subway
cars, he replaced the ads that adorned their insides. The
idea, he said, was to foreground the temporariness of his gestures.
“I wanted to leave an impression,” he said. “As long as you saw and remembered it,
I’m happy with that.” (New York Times)

Abstract artist Gillian Wise, 88, a key member of the
British constructivists, died on April 11. Wise
became the youngest member of the group, which sought to revive the
rational geometry of prewar Europe, in 1961. Although
Soviet-inspired geometric abstraction was at the time out of
fashion, she remained committed to the form, later joining the
Systems group to propel a similar style. Eventually, she left
London and settled in Paris, where she created an ambitious series
of red paintings that remain largely unseen to this day. (Guardian)

Dealer-scholar John Driscoll, 70, who ran one of
America’s oldest art galleries, died on April
10. Driscoll shepherded Driscoll Babcock gallery,
which was founded in 1852, into new territory when he took over in
1987, moving the gallery to Chelsea and signing contemporary
artists to show alongside such established figures as Winslow
Homer and Mary Cassatt. Before turning to the commercial
world, Driscoll held appointments at Yale University and New York
University, among other institutions. (Read the full Artnet News
obituary.)

Prolific Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji, 93, who
designed more than 100 buildings in the country, died on April
10. Chadirji, who died in London, was renowned for
his fusion of modernist forms with traditional Middle Eastern
designs. Among his works was the Unknown Soldier Monument of
1959, which was demolished in 1982. A statue of Saddam Hussein took
its place in 2003. In 2017, an award in his honor was established to recognize
significant projects completed in Iraq. (Arch Daily)

Artist Tom Blackwell, 82, a pioneer of the Photorealist
movement, died on April 8. A self-taught artist,
Blackwell grew up in Chicago and Incline, California, and
moved to New York in the late 1960s, where he emerged
alongside Richard Estes as a key figure in the “New Realism”
movement. He taught at the School of Visual Arts in the 1980s
and has been represented by Louis K. Meisel Gallery since
1976. (Poughkeepsie Journal)

Feminist artist Helène Aylon, 89, who explored Judaism
and pacifism through her work, died on April
6. Aylon, who grew up in Brooklyn and
attended the Shulamith School for Girls, took up art in
earnest after enrolling at Brooklyn College and meeting Mark
Rothko, who visited her studio. She recalled her later encounter
with feminism as “a rebirth that dazzled my imagination like a
sunrise, and plucked me out of the guilt that was caving in on me.”
(Times of Israel)

Lexington, Kentucky, gallery owner Carleton Wing,
77, who left behind a career as a technical writer to explore his
interest in art, died on April 2. The artist and
gallerist, who retired from his full-time profession in the late
2000s, ran his gallery out of Kentucky and Florida while making his
own artworks exploring varying “altered egos.” Among his final
works were portraits of guardian angels. (Lexington Herald-Leader)

Cartoonist Juan Giménez, 76, who created popular
science-fiction comic books with collaborator Alejandro
Jodorowsky. In the 1990s, the pair began
publishing Metabarons, an epic space opera about
patricide and codes of honor. Giménez also worked on the
animated film Heavy Metal and won several prestigious
awards in his field. (Hollywood Reporter)

Curator and painter David Driskell, 88, who championed
the long history of art by African Americans, died on April
1. In 1976, Driskell curated the groundbreaking
traveling survey “Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750–1950,”
which debuted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and featured
the work of 63 artists. Although LACMA asked Driskell to
organize the show, he still had to win over its board. “I
said, ‘It just happens to be that white Americans have little or no
knowledge about what black Americans have done in the visual arts.
So this is an educational process for everybody,’” he recalled in
2009. (Read the full Artnet News
obituary.)

Jersey City gallerist and special-needs children’s
advocate Javiera Rodriguez, 43, died on April 1. A
jewelry designer and teacher in East Rutherford, New
Jersey, Rodriguez was also part of a team that ran the Raven
Gallery from 2014 through 2017. As an artist, she collaborated
with Elisabeth Smolarz for “The Encyclopedia of Things,” a
project that was scheduled to be on view at the Visual Arts
Center of New Jersey through June 7. (NJ.com)

French politician Patrick Devedjian, 75, who was leading
the charge to build a new museum dedicated to the Sun King, died on
March 30. Devedjian was the head of Hauts-de-Seine,
France’s wealthiest district, and was due to serve as director of a
planned museum about Louis XIV in Saint Cloud, Le Musée du Grand
Siècle. Even in his final months, he was busily securing
acquisitions to build out the museum’s collection. (The Art
Newspaper)

Architect Michael McKinnell, 84, famed for his imposing
Brutalist Boston City Hall, died on March 27. The
British-born architect, who attended graduate school at Columbia
University, studied under the German-born architect Gerhard
Kallmann. In 1962, the pair entered a contest to design Boston’s
City Hall and won against more than 250 other submissions. Their
building—a mammoth concrete structure with a sprawling red-brick
pavilion—was intended as a clear rebuke to “degenerate frippery and
surface concerns,” McKinnell later said. (New York Times)

Writer Michael Sorkin, 71, who gave voice to activist
ideas in his architectural criticism, died on March
26. Sorkin made his name as a writer for the
Village Voice in the 1980s, focusing on how urban
design enhanced or denigrated democratic ideals. Among his dozen
books is Twenty Minutes in Manhattan from 2009,
which chronicled his walks through the city. (New York Times)

Artist Paul Karslake, 61, who raised money for
charities by selling his portraits of Hollywood celebrities, died
on March 23. The artist, who lived in the English
town of Leigh and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts,
raised tens of thousands of pounds for organizations such as
hospice centers by putting his portraits up for sale. In 2005, the
Karslake Centre for arts education at the Cornelius Vermuyden
School and Arts College opened in his honor. (Leigh Times)

Critic and historian Maurice Berger, 63, whose prescient
work addressed representations of race, died on March 23.
For seven years starting in 2012, Berger, who grew up in a
public housing project in Manhattan, wrote “Race Stories” for
the “Lens” section of the New York Times, a column that
looked at race in relationship to photography and championed many
non-white image-makers. He also organized the exhibition
“Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American
Television” at the Jewish Museum in 2015. (Read the full Artnet News
obituary.)

Museum founder Ronald W. Lewis, 68, who was dedicated to
preserving the street culture of African Americans in New Orleans,
died on March 20. Lewis was the founder of the House
of Dance and Feathers, a museum that captured the rich local
history of the Lower Ninth Ward and the Mardi Gras Indians who led
(and continue to lead) parades through the city’s black
neighborhoods. The museum was located in a trailer-size building in
Lewis’s backyard and filled to the brim with costumes, photographs,
parade ephemera, and other treasures. (New York
Times)

Modernist architect Vittorio Gregotti, 92, who designed
buildings as well as entire cities, died on March
15. Gregotti, who was as happy to design cultural
centers as he was sporting arenas, was highly regarded for
his Olympic Stadium in Barcelona, for which he preserved a
facade from 1929 while expanding and renovating its interior. He
retired and closed his firm in 2017, saying that “architects
are only creating images, to amaze, rather than propose projects.”
(New York Times)

Watercolorist Liu Shouxiang, 62, who taught at
the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in Wuhan, died on February
13. The artist was highly regarded in his native
China for his still lifes and landscapes. After studying at
the Hubei Institute, he returned to the school as a professor,
and later retired to focus on his artwork. (China Daily)

To submit obituary notices, please contact Pac Pobric at
ppobric@artnet.com.

The post In Memoriam: Remembering Those the Art World Has
Lost in the Coronavirus Pandemic [UPDATED] appeared first on
artnet News.