Volume 29, No. 4, Dec 2006
ARTpeople
Benny Andrews, a painter and teacher whose work drew on memories of his childhood in the segregated South, died in November of cancer at his home in Brooklyn, NY at the age of 75. He taught at Queens College from 1968 - 1997 and established an art program in New York state’s prison system. He was a dynamic storyteller, and a passionate social activist, ranging from civil rights struggle and the antiwar movement to the Holocaust, poverty and the forced relocation of American Indians.
Pontus Hulten, 82, a visionary impresario who embraced artists of many persuasions, conceived of museums as public forums for mind-binding experiences and infused his ideas into the foundations of several major institutions, including the Pompidou Center, MOCA in Los Angeles, Palazzo Grassi. founding director of the Kunsthalle in Bonn, and launched the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland.died in October in Stockholm.
S. Lane Faison Jr., an art history professor at Williams College whose passion for the subject inspired generations of students, a number of whom became curators and directors at top U.S. museums, died in November at the age of 98. He encouraged such students as Earl A. “Rusty” Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and former director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; Thomas Krens of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York City; John R. Lane, director of the Dallas Museum of Art; and Michael Govan, current director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He was also an expert on art confiscated by the Nazis during World War II.
Tom Suzuki, an art director and graphic designer who in the 1970s transformed academic textbooks by introducing vibrant color and pictorial variety to a genre long unchanged using outdated formats, died in September at the age of 76. He introduced bold pictures and dynamic typography to ordinary textbooks making them fascinating.
Marcia Tucker, the founding director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City as well as a champion of emerging artists, died at the age of 66 in October. She was a former curator of painting and scupture at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The great hall on the first floor of the New Museum of Contemporary Art will be named for Marcia Tucker in her memory.
Roy Newell, a painter of geometric abstracts and one of the original members of the American Abstract Expressionists, died in November at the age of 92. He was a vivid colorist, dedicating himself to creating closely wrought, irregular geometrical pattern paintings that resemble quilted fields of color. He was self-taught, a founding member of the Eighth St. Artists’ Club.
