As yet another year draws to a close, it’s a good time to commemorate those in the art world who died in 2024. We at Artnet News want send our condolences to all those who knew and loved them, and express our appreciation for their many artistic achievements and contributions to society.

The list that follows is alphabetical, and contains artists, curators, museum professionals, dealers, among others who made their career in the arts.

Norman Ackroyd, printmaker

Norman Ackroyd at the London Original Print Fair at the Royal Academy of Arts on May 3, 2017 in London, England. Photo: David M Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images.

“Into a bath of his chosen acid, or ‘mordant,’ he would dip a copper plate, masked with an acid-resistant ground, such as wax, varnish or fine clouds of violin-bow resin,” wrote the Telegraph. “The barer the copper, the deeper the acid’s bite, the more ink it would hold, and the darker the tone on the eventual print. Each plate was painstakingly remasked and redipped, perhaps a dozen times, until Ackroyd was content.”

Hope Alswang, museum director

Hope Alswang. Photo by Lila Photo, courtesy of the Norton Museum of Art.

“During Ms. Alswang’s nine years at the [Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida], she diversified its collection with more contemporary art and photography; acquired nearly 1,600 works; focused on generating more original exhibitions, rather than relying too much on traveling shows; and championed women and minority artists,” wrote the New York Times. “In 2011, the museum introduced ‘Recognition of Art by Women,’ an annual series of solo exhibitions that has showcased, among others, the painters Jenny Saville and Sylvia Plimack Mangold and the visual artists Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Phyllida Barlow.”

Carl Andre, sculptor

Carl Andre at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, 1978. Photo: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

“Andre’s inquiries into geometry, horizontality, and materiality, which he began in the mid-1960s alongside peers such as Frank Stella and Donald Judd, would help form the foundations of Minimalism,” Artnet News’s Min Chen and Guelda Voien reported. “His sculptures and installations, variously crafted out of bricks, copper, wood, and even Styrofoam, stripped structures down to their barest forms. With their often flat orientations, they challenged viewers’ relationship to sculpted work, daring to suggest movement.”

David Anfam, curator and writer

David Anfam. Photo by Patrick McMullan.

“After working overtime for years as a lecturer at universities around London, Dr. Anfam burst into prominence in 1990 with a relatively slim but hugely influential book simply called Abstract Expressionism,” reported the New York Times. “In that work and throughout his career, he pushed against the received wisdom that the severe abstraction of artists like Still and Rothko had emerged solely from earlier Modernist movements like Surrealism and Cubism. Instead, he argued, they drew from a wider and older set of inspirations—Rothko from the Dutch masters, Still from Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh.”

Frank Auerbach, painter

Frank Auerbach at his studio, 1983. Photo by Michael Ward/Getty Images.

“In his paintings, there were a few subjects that Auerbach returned to repeatedly, including the London borough of Camden where he lived and his ‘heads,’ portraits of a small circle of preferred sitters, including friend Estella Olive West, professional model Julia Yardley Mills, and his wife Julia,” wrote Artnet News’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. “Dispensing with straightforward naturalism in favor of a more profound psychological realism, Auerbach’s distinctive style emerged from working ever more dense layers of paint on canvas until his works took on an embodied liveliness.”

Nancy Azara, sculptor

Nancy Azara in her studio in the 1970s. Photo courtesy of the Nancy Azara Studio.

“In the heyday of the women’s movement—and of feminist consciousness-raising—in the early 1970s, Ms. Azara and other feminist artists began meeting in their downtown Manhattan lofts, to explore their approach to art making and to sketch out projects that would support women artists like themselves, who were largely shut out of the contemporary (and very male) art world,” wrote the New York Times.

John Boardman, archaeologist

“Back in Britain, Boardman served as an assistant keeper at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1955-59). Its Cast Gallery, containing plaster casts of some 900 Greek and Roman sculptures, became his preferred academic home base, and he published a catalogue of its Cretan collection (1961),” wrote the Guardian. “Working on another, private, collection of art objects in the 1990s gave him ideas about world art, its interconnections and aims. This led him to distinguish three main ‘belts’: a northern one, running from Siberia to North America, where nomads favored small items, often depicting animals; an urban one, from China to central America, more given to monumental architecture; and a tropical one characterized by human forms, notably of ancestors.”

Derek Boshier, Pop artist

Derek Boshier at Art Miami in 2016. Photo by Aaron Davidson/Getty Images for Art Miami.

“Proudly working-class and left-wing in his work, Mr. Boshier was among the vanguard of Britain’s analogue to the Pop Art movement centered in New York and defined by artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein,” wrote the New York Times. “His career took a mass-market turn in 1979, when the British photographer Brian Duffy arranged for Mr. Boshier to meet David Bowie.”

Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Conceptual artist

“Chaimowicz emerged on the London art scene in the early 1970s with his groundbreaking ‘scatter environments’ which were charged with political and feminist discourses of the time,” wrote the Art Newspaper. “Imbued with possibilities, these floor-based, room-sized installations could have been a stage poised for performance or the aftermath of a party. Visitors to Celebration? Real Life (1972) at Gallery House in London could converse and drink tea with the artist living there. It signaled the beginnings of Chaimowicz’s preoccupation with the relationship between art, life, and decor.”

Sarah Cunningham, painter

Sarah Cunningham in her studio. Photo by Magda Kuczmik, Fabula Images, courtesy of Lisson Gallery.

“Born in Nottingham in 1993, Cunningham loved drawing from a young age so ignored any more practical advice she received and pursued a degree in fine art at Loughborough University,” Artnet News’s Jo Lawson-Tancred reported. “There, she worked primarily in collage. She later said she looked back on this period ‘very fondly,’ adding ‘although I wasn’t working in oil at the time it was the start of a lot ideas for me.'”

Isabelle de Borchgrave, artist and designer

“De Borchgrave was already a well-known interior and textiles designer when she became captivated by period fashions in the painting collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art during her many trips to New York City in the 1980s and early ’90s,” according to the New York Times. “There, she pored over the Renaissance portraits, as well as the florid costumes in the paintings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Jean-Antoine Watteau. Back home, she decided to try her hand at creating a period piece for herself—but out of paper, a material she had worked with before, making clothing for children.”

Laurent de Brunhoff, author and illustrator

French cartoonist Laurent de Brunhoff in Paris in 1992 with a stuffed Babar the Elephant, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the famous character, created by his father, Jean de Brunhoff. Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Sygma via Getty Images.

“Jean de Brunhoff published a further four Babar books before he died, leaving two unfinished,” wrote the Guardian. “A year after his death, his brother Michel, editor-in-chief of French Vogue, asked the teenage Laurent to color the black and white illustration plates Jean had left, to complete two more books. De Brunhoff said the publishers had asked his widowed mother if she would agree to someone else doing the books—to which she had replied: ‘Never!’ After the second world war, De Brunhoff trained at a private art school, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, in Paris and harbored ambitions of becoming an abstract painter, but found he could not escape the elephant.”

Martha Diamond, painter

Martha Diamond in 2021. Photo courtesy of Olivia Funk/Martha Diamond Trust/David Kordansky Gallery.

“By the 1970s, Diamond moved into her studio in the nearby Bowery neighborhood of Manhattan, where she remained throughout her career,” wrote Artnet News’s Adam Schrader. “In this era, Diamond began creating her series of cityscapes, capturing the energy and poetry of her hometown with vigorous line work, contrasting tones, and an evocative use of negative space.”

François Duret-Robert, art journalist

“Having studied mathematics and political science at the prestigious l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Duret-Robert became editor and deputy head of the art magazine Connaissance des Arts until 1996, where he specialized in the art market,” reported the Art Newspaper. “He also worked for the French newspapers Le Figaro, Le Monde, and Objet d’Art. For the latter he wrote more than 100 amusing and irreverent columns on the art market, ending in 2020.”

Richard Ellis, artist

“Mr. Ellis had no formal training in marine biology, conservation, painting or writing. But in fusing his artistic flair with an encyclopedic knowledge of ocean creatures, he became an invaluable, sui generis figure to conservationists, educators and those curious about sea life,” reported the New York Times. “In 1969, the American Museum of Natural History hired Mr. Ellis as an exhibition designer and assigned him to help build a life-size blue whale to hang from the ceiling in the Hall of Ocean Life.”

Paal Enger, art thief and professional athlete

“His most famous heist occurred on the opening day of the 1994 Winter Olympics, held in Lillehammer that year, when he stole The Scream from the National Gallery in Oslo,” ARTNews reported. “The painting, then valued at $55 million, was recovered undamaged after Enger confessed to hiding it in a secret compartment in his family’s home. Over the years, Enger was repeatedly convicted for art thefts and drug crimes, and he continued to attract media attention. In 1999, he famously escaped a minimum-security prison, and while on the lam gave interviews to the news and television outlets, much to the chagrin of the police.”

Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, museum director and librarian

Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, the first woman director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, with outgoing director Roy Strong in the Pirelli Garden at the museum in London, U.K., on Tuesday, July 21, 1987. Photo by Bryn Colton/Getty Images.

“Elizabeth Esteve-Coll is best known in the art world for having been a charismatic but at the time much criticized director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, from 1988 to 1995, a turbulent period in its history; but she should also be remembered as a professional librarian at Kingston University and the University of Surrey, then keeper of the National Art Library from 1985 to 1988, as well as a briefer period as vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia from 1995 to 1997,” wrote the Art Newspaper.

Audrey Flack, painter and sculptor

Audrey Flack and parrot with Self Portrait (1974). Photo courtesy of Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York.

“As a young artist, Flack was immersed in the downtown New York art scene, rubbing elbows with the famed Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock—whose advances she rebuffed—and Willem de Kooning at the 8th Street Club and Cedar Tavern,” Artnet News’s Sarah Cascone reported. “But she carved out a space of her own at the forefront of Photorealism in the 1960s after additional studies at New York’s Art Students League.”

Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Conceptual artist

“Characterized for his ability to transcend commonplace subjects and materials in his art, Friðfinnsson worked across performance, sculpture, photography, drawing, and installation for seven decades,” wrote ARTNews. “The artist often used such mediums as paper, cardboard, and mirrors to create works aimed at perceptual shifts. His unique brand of poetic expression came to be called lyrical conceptualism.”

Fathi Ghaben, painter

“In a bold act of early resistance during the early 1980s, a period when Israel strictly prohibited the painting of the Palestinian flag or even the use of its colors, Ghaben defied these bans, portraying the Palestinian people’s plight and their flag in his work,” wrote the Art Newspaper. “His painting Identity, for example, depicts a farmer with a long neck standing defiantly in front of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, carrying the lifeless body of a woman. The colors of the figure’s clothing and the horse’s mane represent the Palestinian flag. Thousands of posters of his colorful art spread around Gaza and the West Bank. His rebellion led to a six-month prison sentence in Israel in 1984.”

Barbara Gladstone, dealer

Barbara Gladstone. Photo by Shawn Ehlers/WireImage, courtesy of Getty Images.

“In an era that was defined by the rise of mega galleries, with ambitious dealers opening branches in cities around the world, Gladstone took a slower and steadier approach,” wrote Artnet News’s Andrew Russeth. “She added her second Manhattan gallery only in 2008, the same year she opened in Belgium. In 2020, amid the pandemic, she brought aboard the maverick dealer Gavin Brown as a partner, when he closed his gallery, and added his outpost in the Italian capital. Her presence in South Korea was inaugurated in 2022.”

Alan Gouk, painter

“During the second half of the ’70s, Alan took part in the artist-run studio exhibitions at Stockwell Depot in south London, bastions of modernist abstraction as it became increasingly marginalized,” reported the Guardian. “His inclusion in an exhibition of four London-based Scottish painters at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 1977 led him to quarrel with the American critic Clement Greenberg, one of a number of Alan’s public disagreements with dominant art-world figures.”

Jim Green, sound artist

“Hundreds of thousands of Denverites have heard Jim Green’s work—but they may not have realized it was art. Train Call is the official name for the jingles—musical riffs, clanks and chimes—that accompany announcements on the trains at Denver International Airport,” according to Denverite. “The recordings are so popular the airport made them available as ringtones a few years back. It’s one of numerous installations of Green’s work around the city. If you’ve ever been surprised by strange sounds drifting up from grates along Curtis Street, had an escalator laugh at you at the Convention Center, or found yourself serenaded by a sink at the Denver Art Museum, you’ve encountered Green’s art.”

Brian Griffin, photographer

Griffin is best known for his iconic album covers, such as Depeche Mode’s A Broken Frame (1982) and Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp (1979), but he was much more than a rock photographer, injecting surreal narrative and noir lighting into commercial and editorial commissions, while pursuing his own projects,” wrote the Art Newspaper. “Griffin made no distinction between personal and assignment work; he put equal energy and ambition into both, always looking to create some playful visual disruption and make lasting, meaningful photographs.

Audrey B. Heckler, collector and philanthropist

Audrey B. Heckler at the opening of “Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler” at the American Folk Art Museum, New York, on September 16, 2019. Photo by Stephen Smith, courtesy of the American Folk Art Museum, New York.

“But it’s almost impossible, and certainly irresponsible, to tell the story of Outsider art’s place in the modern art market and museum landscape without talking about Heckler, such was the scale of her vision and contributions to the movement,” wrote Sarah Kay for Artnet News. “Heckler’s collection at its height numbered more than 700 works by artists including James Castle, Aloïse Corbaz, Madge Gill, Martín Ramírez, and Adolf Wölfli, and it reflected her deep passion for Art Brut and the raw, untrained creativity of self-taught artists often eschewed by the mainstream market and modern tastemakers.”

Alicia Henry, sculptor

“She crafted her figures from wood, leather, linen, cotton, and other materials, and often hand-painted them in shades of brown and gray,” wrote ARTNews. “Sometimes, she stitched her fabrics as well. She drew her inspiration from West African masks and her own memories, and said she wanted her work to speak to conceptions of race and gender.”

Karl Horst Hödicke, painter

Karl Horst Hödicke. Photo courtesy of König Galerie.

“Hödicke created his own exhibition space to present his work in West Berlin in 1964,” Artnet News’s Eileen Kinsella reported. “Despite being internationally recognized for his singular, Expressionist style in the 1980s, there remained ‘an intimate, unpretentious quality to his art that many who knew him and his way of working,’ the gallery said.”

Rebecca Horn, sculptor, performance, and installation artist

Rebecca Horn. Photo: Gunter Lepkowski Germany, courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery.

“Struck by illness again at the age of 20, Horn was forced to drop out of the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts after working with fiberglass without a mask and suffering severe lung inflammation,” reported Artnet News’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. “She spent a year recovering in a sanatorium before continuing to make sculptural works but expanding into performance art, installation, and film. A fascination with both the possibilities and limitations of inhabiting a body would never leave her.”

Maggy Howarth, mosaicist

Maggy Howarth. Photo courtesy of Maggy Howarth Studios.

“It was while redesigning her own cottage garden in Lancashire in the early 1980s that Maggy Howarth first experimented with pebbles, inspired by a tradition of cobblework that she had observed in nearby towns and villages,” according to the Telegraph. “Maggy Howarth’s distinctive style, much of it based on abstract geometric designs, made her pieces instantly recognizable. It had movement and energy, with swirls, curlicues and sweeping curves. Many pieces were figurative and highly decorative, filled with exotic birds, mythological sea creatures and swirling leaves and flowers.”

Gary Indiana, art critic, actor, and artist

Peter Hujar, Gary Indiana Veiled (1981). Photo ©Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery and Fraenkel Gallery.

“In the heady ’80s East Village art scene, Indiana emerged as its dark prince, and starred in Michel Auder’s classic 1981 film A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking, alongside superstars of the heroin underground, writers and actresses Jackie Curtis and Cookie Mueller,” wrote Artnet News’s Annie Armstrong.

Alex Janvier, painter

Alex Janvier, Indigenous artist, on the occasion of his career retrospective at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg. Photo by Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star via Getty Images.

“Throughout his life, Janvier defied expectations for Indigenous people in Canada at the time. By his early teens, Janvier was taking art classes at the University of Alberta, where he encountered the work of European modernists like Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró,” wrote ARTNews. “After high school, Janvier enrolled at Alberta’s Provincial Institute of Technology and Art in Calgary, now the Alberta University of the Arts. His teachers included notable Canadian artists such as Illingworth Kerr and Marion Nicoll, the latter of whom was renowned as one of the country’s earliest abstract painters. After graduation he pursued art full-time, working as a painter, illustrator, and teacher.”

Kasper König, curator

Kasper König. Photo by Brill/ullstein bild via Getty Images.

“König’s career was marked by numerous high-profile roles. Born in Mettigen, Germany, in 1943, König co-founded Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1977, a world-renowned outdoor exhibition that takes place across public sites in the German town of Münster every 10 years,” reported Artnet News’s Kate Brown. “He served as director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, between 2000 and 2012. He also curated the Austrian pavilion in Venice in 2003 and the controversial Manifesta 10 in St Petersburg in 2014.”

Hanif Kureshi, street artist

Hanif Kureshi. Photo courtesy of the St+art India Foundation.

“Kureshi [and] Bahl joined hands with Akshat Nauriyal, Giulia Ambrogi, and Thanish Thomas to found St+art India in 2014. They had different professional backgrounds but shared a common objective in making art more accessible,” wrote the Art Newspaper. “The most notable of their projects include their work transforming Delhi’s Lodhi Colony, for which they partnered with the paint company Asian Paints. As part of the project, more than 50 Indian and international artists made murals on the large walls of the district. These featured typographical and nature symbols, as well as depictions of people who lived in the area—for example, a woman who sold parathas in the colony.”

Dinh Q. Lê, photographer, sculptor, video artist, and installation artist

Dinh Q. Lê. Photo by Tyuki Imamura, courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles.

“In a practice that encompassed photography, video, sculpture, and installation, Lê explored the experiences and perspectives of his forebears as well as his own as a Vietnamese American gay man to create work of tremendous emotional power,” wrote Artforum. “Much of his art critiqued the American take on the Vietnam War—or the American War, as it was known in his own country—and addressed the issues of identity and history that arose from the conflict, including stereotyping, censorship, migration, and exploitation.”

Malcolm Le Grice, artist and experimental filmmaker

“His first proper film work was the two-screen 8mm projection China Tea, about both serving the drink and the material of the teacups. What might have been a drawing or painting study was transposed to film and highlighted framing and the passing of time, and hence ritual and repetition,” wrote the British Film Institute. “Drawing on vanguard ideas in contemporary art and first practicing as both jazz improviser and painter, he quickly generated radical new ways to think about filmmaking, from the mid-1960s onwards. Performance, musicality, the experiential qualities of color all fed in by way of the London counterculture and underground film screenings in DIY, flexible spaces.”

Dorothy Lichtenstein, arts patron

Dorothy Lichtenstein at the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation’s 100th birthday party for the late artist. Photo by Jared Siskin/PMC/PMC.

“Ms. Lichtenstein, by contrast, was described by friends as a gracious philanthropist who was loath to meddle or micromanage. Instead of seeking to sell the work left in her husband’s estate, she simply gave most of it away,” wrote the New York Times. “Her donations consisted of paintings and sculptures, piles of sketchbooks, file drawers bulging with correspondence, and even the building in Lower Manhattan in which Mr. Lichtenstein’s last studio was located.”

James Magee, sculptor

“In 1981, Mr. Magee, who lived in Texas but grew up in Michigan, began working on a quartet of imposing native stone buildings that he called the Hill, though they are neither on a hill nor near one,” observed the New York Times. “They look like rectangular bunkers, or ancient temples, or the sacred site of some intergalactic species that sprung up centuries ago—or perhaps a vision of a postapocalyptic future. They recall, sort of, the minimalist artist Donald Judd’s concrete cubes in Marfa, Texas, or the land-art pioneer Michael Heizer’s inscrutable ‘City’ in Nevada.”

Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, politician

Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow. Photo courtesy of UNESCO.

“M’Bow led Unesco in the decade after a number of nations across Africa and Asia gained independence from colonial European rule,” wrote the Art Newspaper. “He was instrumental in bringing these newly independent states into the fold. During his tenure, Unesco’s membership grew by 27, from 126 nations to 153. African countries including Mozambique, Namibia, Equatorial Guinea and Botswana all joined Unesco during this period.”

Richard Mayhew, painter

Richard Mayhew. Photo courtesy of the artist’s estate and Venus Over Manhattan.

“Mayhew’s mindscape paintings have an ethereal quality to them, in which swaths of color blend into each other,” ARTNews observed. “At times, they are electric shocks of violet, magenta, neon green, pink, and goldenrod, resembling negatives for color photographs. In other canvases, they are hazier tones of the same shade that bleed into each other. Bodies of water and forests of trees and bushes emerge from some canvases; others are wholly abstract, perhaps suggesting a horizon line or the crashing of a wave.”

Ed Mel, painter

Ed Mell with his landscape painting. Photo courtesy of Ed Mell Paintings.

“But after six years in the big city, Mell ached for desert landscapes,” wrote Arizona Highways. “He returned to Phoenix in 1973 and painted part-time while working in commercial art. By 1978, though, he left the 9-to-5 grind and turned to his easel and sculpture full-time.… Mell’s work was modernist, exploratory, vibrant. He captured the American Southwest in a style that was inspired in part by the likes of Maynard Dixon.”

Yong Soon Min, artist and curator

Yong Soon Min, “Defining Moments No. 2” (1992)

“In her own art, Min addressed her position as an artist born in Asia and based in the United States. For her 1989 work Make Me, she photographed herself and split each image in two, cutting out words such as ‘EXOTIC’ and ‘IMMIGRANT,'” observed ARTNews. “That work figured in the New Museum portion of the legendary 1990 exhibition ‘The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s,’ which was also staged at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and is now recognized as prescient for its emphasis on race, gender, class, and sexuality.”

Mick Moon, painter

“The British painter Mick Moon, who has died aged 86, had a sophisticated understanding of the functions of an artwork—its ability to represent a range of subjects and experiences while remaining a unique object in its own right,” wrote the Guardian. “His output ranged from pieces of calico or canvas that had been moulded around studio props, walls or floorboards, to his early ‘strip paintings’—bands of modulated colour on plastic—and his later semi-figurative works, of which the meaning is ineffable.”

Robert Moskowitz, painter

Robert Moskowitz in his Tribeca Studio, New York. Photo by Arnold Newman, Arnold Newman Collection/Getty Images, courtesy the Robert Moskowitz Estate and Peter Freeman, Inc., New York/Paris.

“Even at their most high-concept or severe, though, Mr. Moskowitz’s paintings were always more expressive than he let on. However flat and endless a given field of brown or yellow might be, the works were always constructed with vibrant brushwork and a kind of quiet glee at odds with his stark aesthetic,” observed the New York Times. “Mr. Moskowitz’s gallery, Peter Freeman, Inc., which had just begun to represent him and opened their first show with him shortly before he died, called him, in a statement, ‘a rare bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism.’

Louis Nelson, industrial designer

“In a career of more than 50 years, Mr. Nelson was best known for his graphic design of the 164-foot mural wall at the Korean War Veterans Memorial, dedicated in 1995. The wall is a long expanse of gray granite with etched portraits of 2,400 military personnel who supported the combat troops in the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953,” wrote the New York Times. “The highly polished surface reflects the 19 statues of poncho-clad soldiers sculpted by Frank Gaylord facing the wall. Visitors passing between the wall and the nearly 8-foot-tall statues are led to a reflecting pool.”

Phill Niblock, composer and film and video artist

Portrait of American composer Phill Niblock as he poses at a mixing desk during a sound-check before a concert of his works in the World Music Institute’s ‘Interpretations’ series at Merkin Concert Hall, New York, New York, January 17, 1991. Photo by Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images.

“Niblock had no formal musical training. Nevertheless, he came to be hailed as a leading light in the world of experimental music, not only as an artist himself but also, beginning in the 1970s, as the director, with the choreographer Elaine Summers, of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for dance, avant-garde music and other media,” wrote the New York Times. “He served as the foundation’s sole director from 1985 until his death, and he was also the curator of the foundation’s record label, XI.”

Lorraine O’Grady, Conceptual artist

Lorraine O’Grady. Courtesy of the New Museum.

“Lorraine O’Grady, who went from an early career as a research economist for the government to a second life as a conceptual artist and cultural critic in her mid-40s, died Friday,” reported Artnet News’s Adam Schrader. “She was 90 years old. She is best remembered for her diptychs which juxtapose images for a critical look at gender, race, and class disparities, and as a rock music critic for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice.”

Linda Parry, curator and textiles historian

“Linda Parry, who has died aged 78 of breast cancer and pneumonia, was a museum curator known internationally as the leading expert on the textiles of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. Anyone and everyone with an interest in those subjects—museums, collectors, dealers and the wider public—came to Linda for help and advice, which she shared with generosity,” wrote the Guardian. “Although her expertise ranged much wider than Morris and his circle, she devoted much of her 34-year curatorial career at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and her years of retirement, to researching, publishing, and curating exhibitions on those subjects.”

Gaetano Pesce, designer

Gaetano Pesce, Milan Design Week 2011 at Meritalia Showroom on April 13, 2011 in Milan, Italy. Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images.

“Pesce rebelled at every turn, an ethos inherent in his industrial work in particular, beginning in the late ‘60s,” recalled the Architect’s Newspaper. “Here, the pioneer blurred the line between art and design, experimented with material and color, and dared to ruffle feathers. To AN, he recalled a time in Venice when while with his wife and Peggy Guggenheim he used a Giacometti sculpture for a coat rack, an instance which solidified this approach. ‘I thought that the sculpture would have bent under the weight of the coats, but it actually resisted. That evening my suspicion that art has always been functional and practical, as well as being the bearer of meanings, was confirmed,’ he said.”

Deanna Petherbridge, artist, writer, and curator

“Size was one of the most striking things about her work. In contrast to her own diminutive stature, Petherbridge worked on a monumental scale,” observed the Guardian. “Beginning with Piranesi-esque views of the flat-roofed, white-walled streets of the Greek island where she had a studio, her work evolved into huge drawings such as the five-panel Concrete Armada (1978). Dual interests in architecture and travel added geometric elements of Islamic and Hindu building to her repertoire.”

Richard Pettibone, appropriation artist

Richard Pettibone and his daughter in 2013. (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Wedding Paper Divas)

“Unlike other appropriative artists like Sturtevant, who copied famous artists at scale, Pettibone stood apart predominantly by rendering his source imagery at sizes said to directly echo Artforum advertisements,” wrote Vittoria Benzine for Artnet News. “Furthermore, unlike the artists who’ve mimicked Pettibone’s approach in more recent years, Pettibone maintained a staunch devotion to the perfect craftsmanship of his copies, rather than relying on their ritzy associations to carry them to acclaim. In fact, he’s often remembered as an appropriative artist who actually admired, rather than critiqued, the famous artists he copied.”

Mark Podwal, illustrator and dermatologist

“Dr. Podwal, who chose dermatology as his specialty because it would give him time to pursue his art, began contributing to The Times’s opinion page when he was a resident at New York University Hospital (now NYU Langone Health),” wrote the New York Times. “His first cartoon, published after the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, depicted a faceless Israeli runner, blood pouring from an abdominal wound, as he crosses under an ornate, undersize arch bearing words from the Kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer.”

Katherine Porter, painter

Katherine Porter. Photo courtesy of LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe.

“Ms. Porter used a standard, if slightly idiosyncratic, vocabulary of early modernist abstraction: thick, freely floating steps, curves and spirals; triangles, squares and a plethora of circles; occasional incursions into meaning and representation, like snippets of writing, depictions of barbed wire or shapes that evoke buildings, weather or pointed arch windows; and stormy collisions of these elements that seemed to have overflowed onto the canvas under their own power,” according to the New York Times. “What was distinctive about Ms. Porter’s version was its large scale, its unmistakably unfiltered quality—and its color.”

Mel Ramsden, Conceptual artist

Mel Ramsden in the studio (2019). Photo by Joanna Thornberry,

“In 1969, in New York, alongside Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden co-founded the Society for Theoretical Art and Analyses,” wrote Art Press. “At the same time, Art & Language was founded by Michael Baldwin, Terry Atkinson, Harold Hurrell, and David Bainbridge. After meeting Terry Atkinson in the summer of 1969, Joseph Kosuth became the American editor of the first issue of the journal Art-Language (subtitled The Journal of Conceptual Art ). Art-Language quickly became one of the most influential theoretical platforms of the conceptual movement, and subsequent issues would include writings by Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden. Along with Ian Burn and Joseph Kosuth, Mel Ramsden contributed significantly to the transatlantic expansion of the collective, incorporating artists and theorists from New York.”

Eric Rimmington, painter

“The art of investing arrangements of everyday objects and objets trouvés with meaning has tantalized connoisseurs for centuries,” wrote the Telegraph, but as another critic observed, ‘Rimmington’s cabinet of common-or-garden curiosities holds a similar magic to Velázquez’s… although its meanings are completely contemporary—and not simply because his eggs are in an egg box… Both are masters of the painterly art of letting the genie illusion out of the bottle slowly, not for a flashy trompe l’oeil effect but for some deeper purpose that the viewer is compelled to puzzle over.’”

Faith Ringgold, painter and quilting artist

Faith Ringgold in her studio in Englewood, New Jersey, 2013. Photo by Melanie Burford/Prime for the Washington Post via Getty Images.

“Ringgold is best known for her painted story quilts, which she began in the 1980s,” reported Artnet News. “These narrative pieces, some autobiographical, chronicled Black life and history in intricate panels that blended image and text. Her first such textile work, Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? (1983), reimagined a reductive Black stereotype as a feminist hero, while her most famous quilt, Tar Beach 2 (1990), injected her memories of growing up in Harlem with a touch of fantasy.”

Trina Robbins, comic book artist and historian

“In 1970, Ms. Robbins was one of the creators of It Ain’t Me Babe, the first comic book made exclusively by women,” according to the New York Times. “In 1985, she was the first woman to draw a full issue of Wonder Woman, and a full run on a Wonder Woman series, after four decades of male hegemony. And in 1994, she was a founder of Friends of Lulu, an advocacy group for female comic-book creators and readers.”

Jacob Rothschild, collector and philanthropist

Jacob Rothschild. Photo by Karwai Tang/WireImage.

“But perhaps nothing he did in a life of deeply effective public service had a more immediate impact on the art world than his founding chairmanship of the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF),” observed the Art Newspaper. “When Britain launched its National Lottery in 1994, heritage was nominated as one of five good causes to benefit from lottery profits, and the government needed a conduit for handling grant applications. Rothschild was chairman at the time of the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), a relatively small grant-making body, which was asked to take on the work of the newly instituted HLF, with Rothschild again as chairman, and given responsibility for distributing the Lottery millions. In its first three years of operation, with Rothschild the influential lead on grant discussions, the fund distributed over £900 million ($1.46 billion) for more than 1,600 projects.”

Joseph Rykwert, writer and architect

“Joseph Rykwert was a wide-ranging and intellectually adventurous writer on architecture, particularly its theory and historical texts. He was an influential teacher at Essex and Cambridge universities before succeeding Louis Kahn as Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988,” reported the Art Newspaper. “His books include The Idea of a Town (1963), The First Moderns (1980) and The Seduction of Place (2000), which are particularly admired by architects—including Daniel Libeskind, David Chipperfield and Eric Parry—and led to the award of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Royal Gold Medal in 2014.”

Lucas Samaras, artist

Lucas Samaras in 1978. Photo courtesy of Pace Gallery.

“Since the 1960s, Samaras has been a beloved figure in New York for artworks that have never conformed to any specific movement,” wrote ARTNews. “He produced unclassifiable sculptures, photographs, digital artworks, and more, and he always seemed to function along his own wavelength. ‘To a certain extent,’ he once said, ‘I’m an outsider.’”

Zilia Sánchez, painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Zilia Sánchez with her work at Galerie Lelong and Co., New York, 2014. Photo ©Zilia Sánchez, courtesy of Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.

“For decades, Sánchez was quietly dedicated to her practice, most notably developing her own unique works on canvas, stretched on custom-built wooden armatures to create sculptural hills and valleys that protruded from the wall in an utterly unexpected way. (According to the artist, the inspiration was the shape of the sheet from her father’s deathbed blowing in the wind,)” reported Artnet News’s Sarah Cascone.

Jung Lee Sanders, dealer

“While completing her doctorate, Sanders focused on the development of 20th-century American art museums in relation to institutional purpose and function,” said Art Asia Pacific. “It was during this time that she recognized the lack of galleries and institutions in New York that specialized in, and focused on, supporting contemporary Asian artists. The realization led to her establishing API; its first location was in the SoHo neighborhood, but it has since moved to Tribeca, where the gallery is still located.”

Lillian Schwartz, computer artist

Lillian Schwartz (ca. 1975). Collection of the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan, gift of Lillian F. Schwartz and Laurens R. Schwartz Collection.

“Her achievements included becoming the first female artist in residence at Bell Labs and using computer technology to devise a new theory about Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa,” wrote ARTNews. “She showed at mainstream institutions alongside many of her more famous male colleagues during the ’60s, and even made a name for herself for doing so—a rarity at the time for a female artist.”

Richard Serra, sculptor

Portrait of the sculptor Richard Serra, in front of his piece ‘Tilted Arc’, prior to its removal, at Federal Plaza, New York, May 10, 1985. Photo by Robert R. McElroy/Getty Images.

“After shaking up the insular, self-satisfied midcentury art scene, Serra went on to challenge the wider public with his audacious Tilted Arc (1981), a 12-by-120-foot strip of rusty steel planted in the middle of New York’s Foley Federal Plaza,” observed Artnet News’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. “The confrontational work soon became the subject of heated debate. Bewildered office workers, used to enjoying free range of the square, scrambled to sign petitions that would have this strange, disruptive barrier removed.”

Tony Shiels, artist, magician, and writer

“Unusually for a painter, Tony Shiels’s best known work may (or may not) have been a piece of sculpture,” the Guardian pointed out. “In May 1977, Shiels, who has died at 86, was standing below Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness in the Scottish highlands when a creature appeared in the water. It was, Shiels said, glossy and muscular. He managed to take two color photographs of it, the clearest pictures of the Loch Ness monster then available. The world of Nessology erupted. But excitement gave way to annoyance when Shiels hinted that the shot had been staged, using a Plasticine model he had made.”

Michael Singer, sculptor

“Though he formally trained as a painter, by the early 1970s Mr. Singer had moved into sculpture, constructing abstract, vaguely architectural pieces out of steel and concrete in his Lower East Side loft,” wrote the New York Times. “Soon after a 1971 show at the Guggenheim Museum heralded him as a rising star on the New York art scene, he left the city for a 100-acre farm in southern Vermont. Taking inspiration from the beavers he observed working around the wetlands on his property, he began creating works out of organic material like bamboo, reeds and logs, placing them in and around the same boggy sites.”

Brent Sikkema, dealer

Brent Sikkema in New York City, 2009. Photo by Joe Schildhorn for Patrick McMullan via Getty Images.

“He went on to serve as Vision Gallery in Boston, first as director from 1976 until 1980, then as owner from 1980 to 1989,” Artnet News’s Adam Schrader and Katya Kazakina reported. “After moving to New York in 1991, he opened a contemporary art gallery in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan named Wooster Gardens. It moved Chelsea in 1999 and was later renamed to Sikkema Jenkins & Co. It was known for showing artists including Jeffrey Gibson, Vik Muniz, and Kara Walker.”

Alexis Smith, Conceptual artist

“Smith created art on both an intimate and a large scale, indoors and outdoors, in traditional and untraditional settings,” the Los Angeles Times pointed out. “Her imaginative collages and assemblages have drawn on, not just borrowed—and sometimes edited—quotations by everyone from Milton to Kerouac and Gershwin, and also her recycling of such unexpected raw material as silverware, pressed flowers, seashells and discarded brooms.”

Frank Stella, painter and sculptor

American artist Frank Stella poses for a May 1995 portrait at his studio in New York City, New York. Photo by Bob Berg/Getty Images.

“Stella was on his way, and he would soon become one of his era’s most celebrated figures,” wrote Artnet News’s Andrew Russeth. “The Museum of Modern Art staged a retrospective of his work in 1970 and another in 1987. The Whitney Museum did the same in 2015. In 1964, not yet 30, he was among the artists who represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. The list of his solo shows on his official CV runs more than seven pages.”

Elke Solomon, artist, curator, author, and educator

“A curator in the prints and drawings department at the Whitney Museum of American Art during the 1970s, she inaugurated the museum’s ground-floor exhibitions and co-curated the first Whitney Biennial,” wrote Artforum. “Solomon taught at the Parsons School of Design for over forty years. She was a founding editor of the seminal feminist journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, and, for nearly two decades, a member of New York’s A.I.R. Gallery, the first all-woman cooperative gallery in the U.S. Her work frequently combined a love of food and Jewish tradition with a talent for raucous comedy.”

Daniel Spoerri, artist and writer

Daniel Spoerri, September 1964. Photo by Wieczorek/ullstein bild via Getty Images.

“His first foray into the arts happened in the 1950s, when he studied classical dance,” Emily Steer wrote for Artnet News. “This led to him becoming the lead dancer for the State Opera of Bern. He met numerous artists from the Surrealist movement during this time and staged avant-garde performances such as Picasso’s farcical play Desire Trapped by the Tail. Spoerri connected his early poverty with the art he went on to make.”

Yoshio Taniguchi, architect

“After MoMA, Mr. Taniguchi designed one other building in the U.S., the $48 million Asia Society Texas Center in Houston, completed in 2011. Lisa Gray, writing in The Houston Chronicle, said that to get the building’s limestone facade just right, Mr. Taniguchi had workers at a quarry in Germany cut 470 gigantic blocks, of which he accepted only 50. The 50 were then sliced into slabs about an inch thick. Mr. Taniguchi rejected 90 percent of the slabs,” reported the New York Times.

Anton van Dalen, painter and sculptor

Anton van Dalen with two of his baby pigeons. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

“Van Dalen’s work is celebrated for its intricate, often surreal cityscapes teeming with birds and other wildlife,” wrote Artnet News’s Adam Schrader. “In a coop installed on the roof of his East Village apartment, he bred his own pigeons, birds that he recalled in 2023 were meaningful to him.”

Ben Vautier, artist

French artist Benjamin Vautier, also known as Ben, with his piece “The Indestructible Ego” during an exhibition at the Fondation du Doute, in Blois, France, 2022. Photo: Jean-Francois Monier/AFP via Getty Images.

“Towards the end of the 1950s, Vautier set up Laboratory 32, a shop selling second-hand records that he kept until 1973,” wrote Artnet News’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. “It became a regular meeting place and exhibition space for a community of local artists including Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Bernar Venet, and Sarkis. At Klein’s encouragement, Vautier began writing all over the walls of the shop, a precursor to his later ‘écritures’ paintings, made by applying white acrylic paint straight from the tube onto a dark ground. The short, simple but irreverent slogans eventually became recognizable throughout France, even adorning pencil cases.”

Simon Verity, sculptor

“By the end of the 1980s,” wrote the Guardian, “Verity was at work on a much bigger project, the Cathedral of St John the Divine, the cathedral of the Episcopal diocese of New York, where his deep understanding of the practicalities of stonecutting and the principles of Gothic sculpture resulted in an astonishing bridge-building between past and present.”

Roman Verostko, computer artist

Roman Verostko in his New York studio in 1960. Photo courtesy of Saint Vincent College, Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

“In 1970, following an introduction to programming language at the Control Data Institute in Minneapolis and a summer at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies in Boston, Verostko encountered the expanding leverage of algorithms executed with computers,” per the Minnesota Star Tribune. “Within a decade, he converted his studio into an ‘electronic scriptorium’ with computers and drawing machines known as ‘pen plotters.’ Guided by Verostko’s algorithms, these plotters generated drawings unlike anything he had ever encountered. For him, the computer served as a pathway to new frontiers of form, and he committed his studio entirely to exploring this new frontier. Verostko would come to master the experimental process of writing computer code for creative purposes—a method of making that would occupy his studio practice for decades.”

Bill Viola, video artist

Bill Viola. Photo courtesy of James Cohan Gallery.

“Over his five-decade career, Viola demonstrated the full capacity of video, using it to make art that is probing and profound,” wrote Artnet News’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. “‘I see that media technology is not at odds with our inner selves, but in fact a reflection of it,’ he once said. In addressing universal metaphysical themes like time, space, and human consciousness, his work gained mainstream appeal as well as critical acclaim.”

Guy Warren, painter

“In a career that spanned 70 years, there would be many changes of style in his work,” wrote the Guardian. “In the early 60s, back in Australia, Warren painted pictures such as Children Playing, The Garden Party (1963), which married expressionism with figuration. Space Lens, Yellow, Brown, Blue (1970) marked a move into Kenneth Noland-ish abstraction, although Warren said that he always ‘wanted to get back to the figure. For me, it was all about humanity and nature. Abstraction was never quite enough.’”

Melvin Way, Outsider artist

Melvin Way with one of his artworks in 1994. Photo by Andrew Castrucci, courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York.

“The works defied explanation—especially by Mr. Way, who was on and off schizophrenia medication and who also struggled with cocaine abuse,” wrote the New York Times. “Some drawings, he said, depicted the prevention of cancer. Others were recipes for cocaine, LSD and caffeine. There were even cures for herpes, rabies, pneumonia and scabies.”

Robert Whitman, performance artist

Portrait of Robert Whitman, 2023. Photo by George Etheredge for the New York Times.

“In the late 1950s,” the New York Times wrote, “Mr. Whitman was among a handful of young New York artists who helped give birth to a new form of temporal art, which became known as the Happening—though most of the originators grew to dislike the term, especially after it became a catchall for almost any shaggily structured countercultural event in the 1960s.”

Jackie Winsor, sculptor

Jackie Windsor in 2019. Photo courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

“A leading figure on the New York art scene, Ms. Winsor, who was born in Newfoundland, was the first female sculptor to be given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art,” wrote the New York Times. “She was acclaimed as a post-minimalist — an overly broad label that can refer to most any artist who arrived on the scene in the late 1960s and bemoaned the severity of minimalist reduction.”

Marian Zazeela, light artist and musician

American light artist and designer Marian Zazeela (ca. 1991). Photo by Michael Macioce/Getty Images.

“But in six decades of collaboration,” wrote the New York Times, “[Zazeela’s] most singular influence was graphic. Across concert posters and LP sleeves, many of which the Museum of Modern Art now holds, her designs combined Celtic complexity, Arabic curvatures, and a ritualized numerical precision uncommon even for the baroque 1960s. Favoring rich purples, pinks, charcoals, and pleasing low contrasts, Ms. Zazeela’s visuals allowed [her husband, composer LaMonte] Young’s compositions to be photogenic, synesthetic, and sensuous. Among the works were the founding scores of minimalism and some of the most cerebral and uncompromising in Western music.”