Notable Art-World Figures Who Died This Year

Alonzo Davis, who founded one of the first Black-owned galleries in the United States, died in January at age 82. Born in Tuskegee, Alabama, Davis opened Brockman Gallery in Los Angeles with his brother Dale Brockman Davis in 1967. The gallery, which remained open through 1990, mounted shows that included work by Black artists such as David Hammons, Suzanne Jackson, Kerry James Marshall, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, and Carrie Mae Weems. An artist in his own right, Davis made prints, installations, and paintings that were exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Linda Goode Bryant’s storied New York gallery Just Above Midtown.

Read the full obituary here.

Native American painter Jaune Quick-to-See Smith died in January; she was 85. An artist/activist, Smith is now best known for canvases, often in the style of Joan Miró, Jasper Johns, and other 20th-century giants, that asserted Native Americans’ connection to their ancestral lands. A 2023 Whitney Museum retrospective cemented her reputation as an artist; proof of her influence as an educator and curator was recently evident at Rutgers University’s Zimmerli Art Museum, where Smith organized the survey show “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always.”

Read the full obituary here.

Trailblazing artist Jo Baer, who started out as a Minimalist painter before turning to what she called “radical figuration,” died at 95 in January. Her turn to representational art—and odd representational art at that, featuring as it did dreamlike imagery—confounded critics, but no more so than her earlier Minimalist works, most of them blank white canvases edged with one or two un-Minimalist colors. Both bodies of work have found new audiences in recent years, while Baer’s lifelong refusal to conform has earned her fans among younger artists.

Read the full obituary here.

Acclaimed filmmaker David Lynch died in January; he was 78. His films, among them Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, as well as his television series Twin Peaks, were so distinctively atmospheric and unsettling that the adjective Lynchian came to describe both a narrative trope—the strangeness, unknowability, and perhaps even evil that can lie below the surface of the mundane—and a style of filmmaking involving eerie sound design, bizarre visuals, and devolving plots. Lynch attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art before taking up film; he made art over most of his career and was given a painting retrospective at his alma mater in 2014.

Read the full obituary here.

Richard Flood, who held high-level curatorial posts at the New Museum in New York and Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, died in February at 81. Across his decades of curating, he organized or co-organized such well-received exhibitions as “Brilliant: New Art from London,” at the Walker and “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century” at the New Museum. Flood started his career as managing editor of Artforum; he also did a stint as director of Barbara Gladstone gallery, taught, and wrote art criticism. He was a thoughtful and articulate interpreter of new art—perhaps not surprising in someone whose formal education had been in communication.

Read the full obituary here.

Conceptual artist Mel Bochner, whose interrogation of systems of representation was a hallmark of his work, died in February. He was 84. Early in his career, Bochner’s installations and wall pieces employed measurements, numbers, words, and even photocopies of other people’s drawings. He appeared in some of the most important exhibitions of conceptual art of the 1970s, including “Information” at the Museum of Modern Art, and Harald Szeeman’s Documenta 5. Although his output of that time garnered him a critical following, Bochner’s audience would grow dramatically when, in his final decades, he turned to painting. Featuring strings of at times meaningless or vulgar words executed in drippy, colorful paint on velvet are mordantly funny, even as they showcase the limitations of language.

Read the full obituary here.

Walter Robinson—painter, art writer, editor, magazine publisher, and fixture of the 1980s downtown NYC scene—died in February at 74. An underknown member of the Pictures generation, Robinson exhibited paintings of TV dinners, pulp paperback covers, Persian cats, and other slightly dated markers of American life at Metro Pictures, the Pictures generation’s unofficial headquarters. Early in his journalism career, Robinson wrote for Art in America, co-founded the magazine Art-Rite of brief fame, and co-created the public access TV show ArtBeat. He was subsequently the founding editor of Artnet magazine, where he not only reviewed art but weighed in on the art world’s personalities, trends, and scandals. After leaving Artnet, he continued to write incisive criticism, most famously coining the description “zombie formalism” to describe a trend in abstract art of the time.

Read the full obituary here.

Nona Faustine, a photographer whose work examined the Black experience in America, died in March at age 48. According to her sister, her death came after a five-year battle with cancer. Faustine made research-based series that explored the history of race- and gender-based oppression in the United States even as they celebrated the strength and perseverance of Black women. She was best known for performative self-portraits for which she posed nude at the former sites of slave auctions in New York; in another series, out-of-focus barriers occlude views of national monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial, as if questioning who has access to the freedoms they promise.

Read the full obituary here.

Fred Eversley, an artist associated with California’s Light and Space movement of the 1970s, died in March at 83. Like his peers, who included Larry Bell and De Wain Valentine, Eversley made sleek abstract sculptures from industrial materials. Unlike them, however, Eversley did not come from an art background but left an engineering job to become a sculptor. While others of his cohort focused on perceptual phenomena, Eversley was interested in portraying scientific subjects like black holes and parabolas. “My commitment and focus over all these years stems from my belief that energy is the source of everything in the world,” he told Artforum in 2022. “So I just tried to push that idea as far as I can.”

Read the full obituary here.

Architect Ricardo Scofidio, who with his wife, Elizabeth Diller, founded the firm now known as Diller Scofidio + Renfro, died in March at 89. Along with Diller and firm partner Charles Renfro, Scofidio is perhaps best known for designing museums, among them the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Museum of Modern Art’s 2019 expansion, and the Broad in Los Angeles. While the firm has completed projects all over the world, Scofidio and his partners have had an outsize effect on the cultural life of Manhattan, with projects like the High Line and Columbia University’s futuristic Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center. While not all of the firm’s efforts are beloved, its co-founders’ bent toward experimentation has shaped the way public architecture is experienced for more than 40 years.

Read the full obituary here.

Arthur “Art” Green, a key Chicago Imagist painter and original member of the Hairy Who, Chicago’s electrifying answer to Pop Art, died at the age of 83 in April. The Hairy Who—which also included artists James Falconer, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum—exhibited together from only 1966 to ’69, but they collectively created a formidable legacy with humorous, hallucinatory works inspired by Surrealism, Art Brut, comics, and advertising. According to Green’s New York gallery Garth Greenan, “Throughout his prolific career, Green developed a rich personal iconography. His paintings were populated with archetypal, totemic images of ice cream cones, wood grain patterns, billowing flames, and perfectly polished fingernails.”

Read the full obituary here.

Guy Ullens, a Belgian billionaire who amassed one of the most important collections of Chinese contemporary art in the world, died in April at 90. While doing business in China in the 1990s, Ullens met Chinese contemporary artists like Ai Weiwei at a moment when the scene was significantly expanding, as Ullens told the Wall Street Journal in 2013. With his late wife, Myriam, Ullens would go on to buy important works by Liu Xiaodong, Liu Wei, Zeng Fanzhi, Huang Yong Ping, Wang Keping, and more; his collection would eventually comprise 1,500 to 2,000 works. In 2017 the couple sold off the collection to focus on contemporary Indian art, adhering to Ullens’s established pattern of divesting to fund new areas of patronage.

Read the full obituary here.

Elaine Wynn, a cofounder of Wynn Resorts in Las Vegas who put her billions toward art collecting and arts and education philanthropy, died in April at 82. Wynn and her former husband, Stephen A. Wynn, left an indelible impression on Las Vegas, opening casinos from the Mirage to the Bellagio to the Wynn. Her art collection featured blue-chip names like Édouard Manet, Joan Mitchell, and Lucian Freud; as a philanthropist, she was co-chair of the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a longtime trustee and onetime chairman of the national nonprofit Communities in Schools. “Kids can come to a school that has great teachers, but if they’re hungry, poorly clothed or have a bad family situation, they are not receptive to learning that day,” she told the New York Times Magazine in 2012. 

Read the full obituary here.

Abel Rodríguez, a Columbian Nonuya artist who created delicate ink drawings of native Amazonian trees and plants, died in April. He is thought to have been 80s. In the past decade Rodríguez had become a star of the international circuit, with appearances in recent biennials in Gwangju, Sydney, São Paulo, and Toronto. Last year he appeared in the Venice Biennale alongside his son Wilson Rodríguez, an artist who works under the name Aycoobo. Though Rodríguez was embraced by the art world, he did not necessarily consider his work art but rather saw it as a means of transmitting indigenous knowledge. “In my language, we speak of knowledge, work, intelligence, and craft—that is what is behind images,” he told an interviewer. “Art? I don’t think so.”

Read the full obituary here.

Bill Horrigan, a curator who made Ohio’s Wexner Center for the Arts into a destination for film and video art, died in May at 73. Over his 34 years at the Wexner, Horrigan built a closely watched moving-image program that gained the attention of practitioners such as French filmmaker Chris Marker and American video and installation artist Julia Scher. He also served as a curatorial adviser for the 2008 Whitney Biennial; helped organize the programming of Video Data Bank, a video art distribution company; and led the 1989 edition of Video Against AIDS. Prior to joining the Wexner, he held positions at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center and the American Film Institute.

Read the full obituary here.

Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-born curator behind some of the most significant exhibitions of African contemporary art in recent decades, died in May at the age of 57. She had only recently been diagnosed with cancer. Her death came just months after she was appointed curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale. Kouoh was widely admired for creating shows of African art for African people: In 2008 she founded RAW Material Company in Dakar, an independent art center that is now considered one of the top art spaces in West Africa, and since 2019 she had been executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town, South Africa.

Read the full obituary here.

Dara Birnbaum, a video artist who forever changed her medium with works that rebelled against the mainstream media and upended the one-way stream of information from television to the viewer, died in May at 78. During the late 1970s and ’80s, she harvested images from pirated tapes of TV programs, then re-sequenced them, exposing latent forms of bias that were often invisible to those watching at home. Her work Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79), in which clips of Lynda Carter playing the titular superhero are looped, is now regarded as a touchstone of feminist art. Birnbaum’s engagement with current-day issues only deepened in the years that followed. In 1990, for example, she made Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission, a multiple-monitor installation responding to a student-led rebellion in China the year before. 

Read the full obituary here.

Rosalind Fox Solomon, a photographer who crafted piercing images of alienation, racism, and marginalization in the United States and beyond, died in June at 95. Across a career that spanned nearly six decades, Fox Solomon photographed individuals facing discrimination, from Black Americans in the South to people with AIDS in New York to Palestinians in the West Bank, empathetically registering their emotions. But she kept her distance from her subjects; her method of working, she said, was meant to understand both how they felt and how they were perceived by others. “The depth is in the pictures, not what I say about them,” she once told New York Magazine.

Read the full obituary here.

Joel Shapiro, an acclaimed Post-Minimalist sculptor whose cohort included artists like Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, and Lynda Benglis, died in June at 83. Like the work of his peers, his sculptures subverted the nonrepresentational content, geometric forms, and industrial materials of Minimalism. A show at Paula Cooper gallery in the 1970s, for instance, featured tiny houses in cast iron and bronze, their scale a reaction to the monumentality of Minimalism and their recognizable forms differentiating them from the Minimalists’ abstract sculpture. By the 1980s, he was producing works made from metal beams, with limblike extensions that appear to flap and flail. “I am interested in those moments when it appears that it is a figure and other moments when it looks like a bunch of wood stuck together,” he once said.

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Leonard Lauder, heir to a cosmetics fortune and a major art collector and philanthropist, died in June at the age of 92. The eldest son of Estée Lauder, he helped build her eponymous company into a behemoth over his many decades working there. Lauder’s personal art collection was the result of 40 years of collecting and was estimated to be worth more than $1 billion. Lauder had particularly deep ties to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2013 he gifted the museum 81 Cubist paintings, sculptures, and collages, including works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Juan Gris. Lauder also held the title of chairman emeritus at the Whitney Museum and was a trustee there from 1977 to 2011.

Read the full obituary here.

Robert Wilson, a playwright and artist who cultivated a loyal following in the art world, died in July at 83. Wilson’s work ran the gamut from sculpture to operas; he saw little division between artmaking and theater. Born in Waco, Texas, he attended the University of Texas, then moved to Brooklyn to study architecture at the Pratt Institute, where he drifted toward dance and made his first theater pieces. After graduating in 1966, Wilson founded an experimental performance company, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. In 1976 he broke new theatrical ground with Einstein on the Beach, a five-hour opera with music by Philip Glass and little in the way of traditional narrative. Other major productions followed, making Wilson’s name as a director. In 1992 he founded the Watermill Center, an arts laboratory on Long Island.

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Raymond Saunders, who created enigmatic paintings with sociopolitical overtones, died in July at 90. Saunders’s assemblage-style canvases are distinctive for their integration of found objects and imagery and their extensive use of black paint. Saunders received a BA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he later taught. His work has been featured in seminal exhibitions including “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, 1963–1983,” organized by Tate Modern in London in 2017, and “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980,” organized by L.A.’s Hammer Museum in 2011. In 2025 a retrospective featuring 35 of Saunders’s large-scale works was on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Read the full obituary here.

Agnes Gund, one of the most influential American art collectors and art patrons of her time, died in September. She was 87. Gund’s patronage was most deeply felt at the Museum of Modern Art, to which she donated more than 250 artworks. She was also listed as a standing trustee at the Cleveland Museum of Art, a life trustee at the Morgan Library and Museum, and an emeritus director at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. Over 60 years, starting in the mid 1960s with Abstract Expressionism, Gund brought a discriminating eye to art collecting, paying special mind to women artists and artists of color. In 1977 she started the nonprofit Studio in the School, which offers children art classes, and during the AIDS crisis she backed the struggle for gay rights. In 2017 she sold a Roy Lichtenstein painting for $165 million in order to launch the Art for Justice Fund, a campaign to end mass incarceration.

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Robert Grosvenor, a sculptor who flirted with Minimalism before producing increasingly idiosyncratic works, died in September at 88. Grosvenor gained acclaim in New York during the 1960s when he showed his work alongside famed Minimalists, appearing in such exhibitions as the movement-defining “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum in 1966. But the sculptures he made in the following decades diverged from Minimalism, even though these works, too, were spare and made from industrial materials. He crafted steel forms that extended down from the ceiling, chopped up heavy wood beams and painted them with creosote, and produced sculptures that looked like cars, boats, and trailers. The peculiarity of his art was one reason Grosvenor found so many admirers, including critic Roberta Smith, who called him “the lone wolf of sculpture.”

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Artist, writer, and sometime wrestler Rosalyn Drexler, whose paintings of movie stars, mafiosos, and advertising images have in recent years gained widespread praise, died in September at 98. Drexler is today thought to be one of the key artists associated with the Pop Art movement. Like Andy Warhol, she painted Marilyn Monroe. Like James Rosenquist, she was drawn to commercial imagery. Like Marisol, she expressed concern over how the media encouraged violence against women. Drexler frequently worked with found images, painting out the surrounding backgrounds to defamiliarize them. A 2016 exhibition of her work at the Rose Art Museum brought increased attention to her work, which was subsequently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum, among other institutions.

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Alison Knowles died at 92 in October. Along with George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, George Brecht, and others, she was a key artist of the 1960s Fluxus movement, which emphasized performance. Many of Knowles’s sculptures, performances, and musical works were so simple that anyone could produce them, which was exactly her point. Make a Salad, first performed in 1962, is rooted in an event score—a text-based directive that can be enacted by its reader. That score, in this case, consists only of its title, with no further directives. It has since been performed in venues ranging from Art Basel in Switzerland to London’s Tate Modern. “I want my work to expand the terms of engagement,” Knowles told the New York Times in 2022. “I don’t want people looking passively at my work but actively participating.”

Read the full obituary here.

Ken Jacobs, a leading experimental filmmaker, died in October at 92. Jacobs was a central figure of the New York underground film scene of the postwar era. He pushed the limits of what cinema could be in works like Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969), in which a portion of a D.W. Griffith movie is slowed down, stilled, and looped. It’s now considered an iconic example of structuralism, in which filmmakers call attention to physical aspects of their medium. While Jacobs is core to experimental film history, he had until recently remained on the fringes of the 1960s art canon. But lately his work has been featured widely in New York museums. His 1960 film Little Stabs at Happiness is currently on view at the Whitney Museum in the exhibition “Sixties Surreal.”

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Mohamed Hamidi, a founding father of Moroccan modern art, died in October at 84. Hamidi was born in Casablanca in 1941 and studied art there before moving to Paris in 1959. His return home in 1967 coincided with a cultural renaissance—in everything from fine art to graphic design—that fused modernist ideas with the particulars of Moroccan culture. From 1967 to 1975, he taught at the newly “democratized” Casablanca School, which nurtured a new generation of socially engaged and forward-thinking Moroccan artists. Although Hamidi’s paintings centered on the body, they were largely abstract, incorporating curving lines characteristic of Casablanca School artworks, motifs inspired by traditional Maghreb crafts, and intersecting geometric shapes that, while not strictly representational, were distinctly erotic.

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Milton Esterow, who owned and edited ARTnews from 1972 until 2014, died in October at 97. Esterow attended Brooklyn College and, while a student there, got a job as a copy boy with the New York Times, which named him a reporter in 1948. He initially focused on crime, then turned to the arts. His approach, unusual for its era, involved treating art stories as occasions for investigative journalism. In 1964 he wrote a piece on plundered art in Europe during the years after World War II; it made the front page of the Times—a rarity for an art story both then and now. Esterow’s impact on ARTnews (which is now owned by Penske Media) was most evident in its transformation into a news-focused entity that gained national recognition for some of its investigative reports.

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Dorothy Vogel and her husband, Herbert, became famous for building an impressive art collection while working as a librarian and postal clerk, respectively. Dorothy died in November at 90. The couple married in 1962 and immediately started collecting, using his salary to purchase art and hers for their modest living expenses. (Herbert died in 2012.) They bought the Minimalist, Post-Minimalist, and conceptual art of their time, including works by such artists as Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, and Christo. They famously never sold anything from their collection, which was housed in their one-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment on New York’s Upper East Side. In 1992 the Vogels announced that they would gift their holdings to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

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Martin Parr, a photographer best known for his wry pictures of shoppers, sunbathers, and sightseers, died in December at age 73. He remains most famous for his 1983–85 series “The Last Resort,” for which he shot bathers at New Brighton Beach in England. The photos capture a culture in thrall to the idea of relaxation but unable to actually achieve it. Parr continued that theme with his 1987–94 series “Small World,” in which he photographed sightseers in foreign locales, doing anything but looking at the sights. He joined the Magnum photography collective in 1994 and served as its president from 2013 to 2017. He also regularly showed in art museums, with retrospectives at the Barbican Centre in London and the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Parr will next year be the subject of a retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.  Munich.

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Frank Gehry, an award-winning architect whose designs for museums proved widely influential, died in December at 96. More so than perhaps any other architect of the past half-century, Gehry changed the field of museum architecture. His undulating forms helped move art institutions in a new direction, showing that they need not be Neoclassical pantheons or hard-edged modernist structures. The most famous of his museum buildings was the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Spanish museum that opened in 1997. Gehry would go on to oversee other museum buildings, including an expansion of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fondation Louis Vuitton museum in Paris, and LUMA Arles in France. Another Guggenheim museum, in Abu Dhabi, is currently being built.

Read the full obituary here.