The legendary artist, filmmaker, beat poet, and Lower East Side institution Taylor Mead passed away yesterday after a stroke. Mead had recently relocated to Colorado after leaving his rent-stabilized Ludlow Street apartment in April due to a conflict with the property’s landlord over renovations. He was 88. (To read J. Hoberman’s obituary of Taylor Mead, click here.) (more…)
William Wilson, a former art critic for the Los Angeles Times, died Saturday, the LA Times reports. He was 78, had had a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease. Wilson first began writing criticism for the LA Times in 1965, while still a student at UCLA — he first got a degree in design and later pursued a graduate degree there in art history. In 1978, he joined the staff when the critic at the time, Henry Seldis, died. Wilson stayed on until 1999 when he departed to write a book about the history of art in LA. and continued to contribute to the newspaper until 2001. (more…)
Today the Chinese-French artist Zao Wou-Ki, who had kept a studio on the top floor of his home in Paris’s 14th arroundissement from 1960 until recent complications from Alzheimer’s forced him to stop working, died in Switzerland at age 92. He had been hospitalized on two occasions in the last month and half, Le Monde reports. Zao was born in Beijing in 1921, enrolled in Hangzhou’s School of Fine Arts in 1935 — where he learned to paint in traditional Chinese and Western styles — and first traveled to Paris in 1948, when he became heavily influenced by European modernists like Picasso, Matisse, and Klee. (more…)
The family of former gallerist Daniel Reich, whose namesake gallery on West 23rd Street grew out of an alternative art space that he launched in his apartment during the months following the September 11 attacks, has announced that Reich committed suicide on December 25 of last year, Artforum reports. Reich, who had learned the ropes working for dealer Pat Hearn and whose own gallery represented artists including Amy Gartrell, Futoshi Miyagi, and Susanne M. Winterling, announced the shuttering of his 23rd Street space in September of 2011 and plans to reopen elsewhere in another form, which never came to pass. (more…)
The Russian street artist Pasha P183, known for his irreverent and playful murals and public artworks incorporating elements of the built environment and dubbed “Russia’s Banksy,” has died in Moscow at age 29 under unknown circumstances. The Teatralnoye Delo theater company, which had recently commissioned him to create the backdrop for its production of a musical titled “Todd,” told the AP that the artist had died on Monday, but gave no additional information. (more…)
The Indian artist Ganesh Pyne has passed away in Calcutta at the age of 76 from a heart attack, BBC News reported. His paintings and drawings, whose dark and dim scenes show the influences of European masters of chiaroscuro like Rembrandt but also that of India’s Abanindranath Tagore, portray imaginative scenes in which he developed his own system of myths and recurring characters, including his trademark monkey figure “Bir Bahadur,” which is Bengali for “Master of All Things.” (more…)
The Canadian artist Maurice Savoie, a sculptor who created strange and wondrous works out of ceramic and in bas-relief public murals, has died at the age of 82, Montreal’s La Presse reports. A student at the École du meuble de Montréal and the École des beaux-arts de Montréal beginning in 1948, Savoie also studied in Italy and France before returning to Quebec. His career took off after his work was shown at Expo 67. (more…)
Udo Kultermann, a scholar and historian of art and architecture who taught for nearly three decades at St. Louis’s Washington University and published over 35 books during his career, died in New York on February 9 at the age of 85, his family said in a statement. The German-born scholar received his Ph.D. from the University of Muenster and served as the director of Leverkusen’s City Art Museum before moving to the U.S. (more…)
The American artist Richard Artschwager, who blurred the lines between minimalism, conceptual art, and pop art, has died at 89 . The news was confirmed late Saturday afternoon by Gagosian Gallery, which represents Artschwager. The artist’s death comes just a few days after his second Whitney Museum retrospective, “Richard Artschwager!” closed in New York. It will travel to Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum and the Haus der Kunst in Munich later this year.
Kiante Campbell, an 18-year-old Oakland resident who was slated to graduate from Ralph J. Bunche High School in June was murdered in a shooting following the monthly Oakland First Fridays Art Festival gallery walk on the night of February 1, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The shooting, in which three others were injured, occured at 10:53pm near the corner of 20th Street and Telegraph Avenue, according to a statement released by Oakland First Fridays. (more…)
