CAA News Today

In its semimonthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, teachers, curators, museum and gallery directors, art dealers, auction-house administrators, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts.

• Keith Aoki, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis, who helped create Bound by Law? Tales of the Public Domain, a comic book about copyright law and fair use, died on April 26, 2011. He was 55
• Jackson Burnside, a Bahamian artist, architect, and activist who was a cultural icon in his country, died on May 11, 2011, at the age of 62
• Matthew Carr, a figurative artist who drew portraits of Tom Stoppard and Diana Ross, died on February 23, 2011, at the age of 57
• Nimai Chatterji, a collector of postwar avant-garde art and literature, including artist’s books, posters, and audiovisual material, died on December 25, 2010. He was 77
• Polly K. Evans, an artist, teacher, and graphic designer who worked in the Byzantine studies program at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, died on December 28, 2010. She was 53 years old
• Jack Franses, a specialist in and dealer of textiles, tapestries, and oriental carpets who once led a department of Islamic art at Sotheby’s in London, died on December 10, 2010, at age 83. He also designed and taught classes at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies
• Creighton Gilbert, a historian of Italian Renaissance art who taught for many years at Yale University, died on April 6, 2011, at the age of 90. CAA’s longest standing member, Gilbert was editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin from 1980 to 1985 and shared the Frank Jewett Mather Award with Harold Rosenberg in 1964
• Sam Green, a promoter of Pop art who as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia gave Andy Warhol his first retrospective in 1965, died on March 4, 2011. He was 70
• Stephen Hahn, a connoisseur, collector, and dealer of modern art who was a past president of the Art Dealers Association of America, died on April 2, 2011. He was 90
• John Hinchcliffe, a weaver, potter, printmaker, and designer who in 1991 had a retrospective at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth, England, died on December 20, 2010. He was 61
• Erlund Hudson, an artist who documented the home front in England in painting and drawing during World War II, died on March 9, 2011. She was 99 years old
• Gwyneth Johnstone, a British painter whose work absorbed the influences of Western art from the Italian Renaissance to modernism, died on December 8, 2010, at the age of 95
• Nancy Kominsky, an artist and the star of the television program Paint Along with Nancy, shown in the United Kingdom from 1974 to 1978 and rebroadcast in the United States in the 1980s, died on March 11, 2011. She was 95
• Suzanne Lang, a potter who expressed her Marxist beliefs on plates, pots, and jugs, died in March 2011. She was 69 years old
• Gordon Lebredt, a Canadian conceptual artist and writer who also fixed and raced motorcycles, died on February 26, 2011, at age 62. A monograph on unrealized projects, Gordon Lebredt: Nonworks 1975–2008, was published earlier this year
• Craig “Pirate” Lucas, a painter, associate professor emeritus at Kent State University, and the winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize’s 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award for Visual Arts, died on April 1, 2011. He was 69 years old
• Ioana Nemes, a Romanian artist who showed across Europe and was on a residency at Art in General in New York, died on April 23, 2011. She was 32
• Christopher Pemberton, an English painter, teacher, and translator of Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, died on December 1, 2010. He was 87 years old
• Jane Phillips, a painter turned curator and director who led the Mission Gallery in Swansea, Wales, died on February 6, 2011. She was 53 years old
• John Pitson, a British typographer who had directed the Australian Government Publishing Service and helped author the influential Style Manual for Authors, Editors, and Printers (1966), died on November 25, 2010. He was 92
• Lancelot Ribeiro, an Indian artist who settled in Great Britain whose abstract and representational work covered a range of styles and subject matter, from figuration to landscape to still life, died on December 25, 2010. He was 77 years old
• Harold Rotenberg, an American artist who worked in an Impressionistic style and taught at the Museum School and School of Practical Arts (now the Art Institute of Boston), died on April 2, 2011. He was 105
• Heather Ann Sackett, an artist based in Syracuse, New York, who worked in sculpture and ceramics, died on March 17, 2011. She was 56 years old
• Tessa Sidey, a curator of modern and contemporary art for the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in England, died on January 1, 2011, at age 55. Among her career highlights is the exhibition Surrealism in Birmingham 1935–1954 and its catalogue
• Julian Thompson, a leading expert in Chinese porcelain who was chairman of the London branch of Sotheby’s from 1982 to 1990, died on January 16, 2011. He was 69
• Robert Vickrey, a Magic Realist painter who appeared in nine Whitney Museum Annuals in the 1950s and 1960s, died on April 17, 2011. He was 84 years old

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA.