Pope.L brought art to the people, reaching beyond institutions and into the street, putting statements about the condition of Black Americans out into the open. With vivid defiance, Juanita McNeely captured American women’s experiences, making a painting about abortion before the original passing of Roe v. Wade. Vera Molnár propelled us forward with her early usages of computers in her art.

Others left far too soon: Lin May Saeed, whose art encouraged empathy with animals and activist musings, and Vincent Honoré, whose cutting-edge exhibition and criticism championed women and queer artists.

In the case of painter Brice Marden, Barry Schwabsky recalled for Art in America, “It seemed as though Brice Marden had always been there and always would be.” While we may take these continued presences for granted, it’s important to recall the impact that Marden and others have made. As Schwabsky writes, “He managed to make each of us a little bit more an artist.”

Perhaps, then, we ought to remember signs of the people who left us in 2023 will always be with us. Below, a brief look back at the lives of 28 artists, collectors, curators, and more who died in 2023.

Across the past four decades, Pope.L amassed an oeuvre of works that thwarted easy readings, offering up situations that alluded to the condition of Black Americans without outright stating what they were trying to communicate. The sculptures, installations, performances, and conceptual artworks that Pope.L created were often provocative and sad—and, more often than not, funny, too, in ways that could be shocking.

Despite the fact that his artworks were intentionally somewhat inscrutable, they amassed a wide audience, and were shown in venues ranging from the Whitney Biennial to Documenta. A 2018 profile of Pope.L that appeared in T: The New York Times Style Magazine said that he was “inarguably the greatest performance artist of our time.”

He cast his art as a larger quest to understand the opposed concepts of Blackness and whiteness. “Black folks’ political and historical circumstances are at odds with whiteness, whether we want them to be or not,” he said in a 1996 interview with the artist Martha Wilson. “There are societal limitations to how much one can reconstruct one’s conditions. We are born into whiteness. On the surface, it seems wholly to construct us, and the degree to which we may counter-construct sometimes seems very limited. But, I believe we can be very imaginative with limitations.”

Pope.L was most famous for his crawl performances, for which he traversed set distances on his hands and knees. These works, first begun in 1978, were staged in locales around New York City and beyond, and were always conducted outside art institutions, in the view of the general public. The formula for his crawl performances, though seemingly simple, ended up being flexible, broaching knotty issues about success, suffering, and Blackness.

Beginning in 2001, working in parts, he undertook the most epic of his crawl performances, making his way all the way from the southernmost of Broadway in Manhattan to his mother’s home in the Bronx. He wore a Superman uniform and a skateboard strapped to his back, and kicked off the performance at the Statue of Liberty, making his way to Manhattan by ferry. The work hinted at the difficulty of achieving freedom while also indirectly hinting at an exploration of the racism that hinders that quest.

He staged dozens of crawls, repeating the grueling act so many times that he reportedly ended up with several fused vertebrae. These performances rankled some onlookers: Pope.L once recalled that a Black viewer nearly kicked him in the face during one performance in which he crawled across a gutter. For some critics, his willingness to debase himself before an audience spoke to a larger exploration of his own value to society as a Black man.

“Pope.L uses his own body instead of crafting mute sculpture to reflect on the treatment of the self as an object,” artist and writer Aria Dean noted in an Art in America essay about Pope.L. “‘Am I, a black man, for myself? How much?’ his oeuvre asks. And it offers a pessimistic answer: potentially not at all.”

Later works would prod how white viewers considered Blackness. For an ongoing project known as the Black Factory, begun in 2004, he asked people to submit objects they associated with Blackness. What he amassed—extra-large condoms, bandanas—spoke to a range of stereotypes.

In an interview with the Guardian, he said of the project, “I realised that for a lot of white people, mostly white people, their experience of race is personal. I’ve never thought of my experience of race as just mine.”

Pope.L was born in 1955 in Newark, New Jersey, to a mother that he described as an addict and an alcoholic. (He initially began working as William Pope.L, then dropped the William. His surname draws its L from his mother’s last name, Lancaster; Pope was the last name of his father, who did not raise him.) He said that his early upbringing had ultimately moved him to create the work that he did.

“My family life was very uncertain,” he said in the 1996 interview with Martha Wilson. “I’ll never get rid of that uncertainty. We never knew from one moment to the next when we would move, what we were going to eat . . . You grow up scared. You realize that there’s not much difference between you and street people.”

Pope.L recalled that his grandmother, a cleaner, spurred on his interest in art by introducing him to one of her clients, a portrait painter.

Initially, Pope.L attended Pratt College, a prestigious Brooklyn art school, but he could not afford it and ended up dropping out before graduation. After working factory jobs, he finished out his undergraduate art education at what is now Montclair State University. He also attended the Whitney Museum’s hallowed Independent Studio Program, then received an M.F.A. from Rutgers University in 1981.

Pope.L’s earliest works were often staged in the street, beyond gallery walls. In 1978, he enacted Thunderbird Immolation a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece, for which he sat in the lotus position on a SoHo sidewalk. He surrounded himself with matches, a reference, seemingly, to the monks that set themselves on fire in protest of the Vietnam War.

Yet many of his initial experiments were waged in the world of theatre. He took classes at the famed Mabou Mines program, which is known for its experimental methodologies, and would go on to teach at Bates College in Maine. At that school, in 1990, he staged a production of the Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin in the Sun, which memorably chronicles an African American family’s attempts to make an insurance payment while also preserving their unity and financial stability. Pope.L’s version contained a sly twist: the cast was composed not just of Black actors but white ones, too.

His breakthrough with an art-world audience came in 1991. Sitting in the front window of New York’s Franklin Furnace art space, Pope.L slathered himself in mayonnaise, a material that he said lent him a kind of “bogus whiteness.” The piece’s plainly funny title, I Get Paid to Rub Mayo on My Body, suggested self-commodification in the name of art.

So too did another legendary performance, 1997’s ATM Piece, for which Pope.L donned only a pair of Timberland boots and a skirt made of dollar bills, attached himself to an ATM by an eight-foot-long chain of sausage links, and doled out money to passersby. The work alluded to a newly passed law that made it illegal to panhandle within 10 feet of an ATM, and Pope.L seemed to know that he was flirting with trouble. He ended up being labeled an “E.D.P.” (emotionally disturbed person) by a police officer; a photograph documenting the performance preserves that very confrontation between him and a cop.

Pope.L’s work grew increasingly ambitious in the decades afterward.

Starting in 2000, he began creating a web-based project called distributingmartin. It could be accessed via a hidden portal on the website for the Black Factory, and involved attempting to disperse Martin Luther King, Jr.’s body. In typical fashion for Pope.L, when queried about the project by the digital art–focused organization Rhizome, he said that he wasn’t sure what the work meant.

In 2008, he produced Trinket, a 45-foot-long American flag that shreds itself as it blows in the wind; a version of it later acted as the backdrop to a performance by the rapper Kendrick Lamar. (Only recently did the work find an institutional home with the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, due to its unusual format.) And in 2017, he staged Flint Water, an installation and performance that involved bottling contaminated water from Flint, the majority-Black Michigan city that has been mired in crisis for much of the past decade. The bottles were produced as an edition and made available for sale.

Toward the end of the 2010s, Pope.L’s art began to receive mainstream recognition, appearing in the Whitney Biennial, where he won its $100,000 prize, and in Documenta, where he showed Whispering Campaign, which emitted phrases uttered in hushed tones from speakers set throughout the German city of Kassel. In 2019, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, both in New York, staged what amounted to an unconventional mid-career survey. ArtReview reported that Pope.L had tried to name the show “How Much Is That Nigger in the Window?,” after a crawl piece from the ’90s. According to the artist, MoMA “had concerns,” so that title was nixed. The show ended up being called “member.”

Just this past November, Pope.L opened his first British institutional exhibition at the South London Gallery.

Many of Pope.L’s works involved linguistic games, enlisting puns and printed texts to befuddle viewers. His performance Eating the Wall Street Journal involved ingesting the copies of the titular publication while wearing only a jockstrap, and his “Skin-Set Drawings” played with the language used to describe Blackness and whiteness (“BLACK PEOPLE ARE TAUT,” for example). The curator Lowery Stokes Sims once called Pope.L the “the poet laureate of male performance artists.”

Artists typically produce biographies and statements for their curricula vitae. But Pope.L’s approach to disseminating information about himself was somewhat different. When he met people, he would hand them a business card. On it, he labeled himself “the friendliest black artist in America©.”

“A key protagonist of the Arte Povera movement and an artist of the Gallery for 39 years, Anselmo pursued and explored his practice in relation to nature, the finite and the indefinite, the visible and the invisible,” the gallery said in a statement.

Like many in the Arte Povera movement, Anselmo crafted oddball, highly memorable sculptures that combined industrial and organic matter. Many of Anselmo’s works subject materials—stones, steel, lettuce, fabric, glass, and more—to the forces of gravity.

Torsion (1968), a work held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, contains a wood block with leather wrapped around it. The leather is encased within a giant cement cube, and the block is leaned against the wall, establishing a delicate balance that keeps this bizarre object in place.

Untitled (Sculpture That Eats), a work made that same year, includes a low rectangle of granite with a cube of the same matter attached via a piece of wire. Sandwiched between the two is a piece of fresh lettuce. Over time, the lettuce decays, gradually causing the smaller granite element to slip until it falls onto a bed of sawdust beneath.

Anselmo’s works had a metaphysical dimension that he described as being borne from a larger philosophical inquiry. “I, the world, things, life—we are points of energy, and it is not necessary to crystallize these points as it is to keep them open and alive, functioning in our life,” he once said.

Born in 1934 in Borgofranco d’Ivrea, Italy, Anselmo started out as a self-taught painter before turning to sculpture. He also produced conceptual works such as La Mia Ombra Verso l’Infinito Dalla Cima Dello Stromboli Durante L’Alba del 16 Agosto 1965 (1965), for which he ventured to a volcanic island off the coast of Sicily and photographed himself as the sun hit him. He added pencil lines to his pictures that suggested the rays emanating toward him, effectively visualizing something that was normally impossible to see.

Arte Povera, as theorized by the curator Germano Celant, made use of cheap, “low” materials as a reaction to bourgeois forms of art-making like painting, which is more permanent. Some art historians now view these works as responses to the Italian condition after World War II.

As his star ascended alongside Arte Povera figures such as Jannis Kounellis and Michelangelo Pistoletto, Anselmo started to show widely in Europe. He figured in four editions of the Venice Biennale, including the 1990 one, at which he won the Golden Lion for painting. He also featured in two editions of Documenta, the taste-making exhibition that happens once every five years in Kassel, Germany.

At the time of his death, Anselmo was working on a survey for the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. The show is currently slated to open in February. His work will also be included in a major Arte Povera exhibition, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, will open at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris next fall. “I loved him enormously. He oriented, showed me the meaning of ultramarine blue, beyond the sea, oltremare, far away and yet here, now, alive,” Christov-Bakargiev wrote on X.

A number of works by Anselmo took the form of stones embedded with compasses—cryptic objects that pointed up the searching quality that recurred throughout the artist’s oeuvre. Of one 1967–68 sculpture titled Direzione, he once said, “The work begins in the place where it is, and ends where the Earth’s magnetic fields are, the center of the planet.”

Hunt’s sculptures wind their way through space, evoking figures which transmute and grow, their bodies altering in the process. Though they are abstractions, these works also sometimes visualize elements of Black history.

Widely regarded as one of Chicago’s most important artists, Hunt first achieved acclaim during the late ’50s and would go on to find a national following by the start of the ’70s. When New York’s Museum of Modern Art mounted a survey of Hunt’s sculptures, drawings, and prints, New York Times critic Hilton Kramer effusively praised him as an exceptionally gifted artist who had matured early on—a feat, Kramer said, that few others could claim.

He would go on to make an array of monumental sculptures for highly visible public venues, including ones in Harlem and Chicago. In 2022, Hunt was commissioned to do a new work for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, which will open in 2025. Titled Book Bird, it will feature a bird perched atop a book, ready to take flight.

Another forthcoming sculpture from Hunt, a 15-foot-tall work titled Hero Ascending, will be installed near the home of Mamie Till and her son Emmett Till, a Black Chicagoan teen who was lynched by a white mob in 1955 after he was accused of flirting with a white woman. Hunt had attended Emmett’s open-casked funeral, and said in his artist statement that he aspired to do him justice. “It is one thing to make art that is a portrait, but for something like the Middle Passage or Emmett Till, you want to develop art that is not a portrait of Emmett Till but something that projects his life, ideas and ideals beyond his lifetime,” Hunt wrote. The sculpture is set to be installed next year.

Richard Hunt was born in Chicago on September 12, 1935, to parents who were descended from enslaved people. His father was a barber; his mother, a librarian. As a teenager, he took classes at the junior school of the Art Institute of Chicago, whose college he would later attend to study art education.

“Sculpture of the Twentieth Century,” an acclaimed 1952 MoMA survey of recent developments in the medium, made its way to Chicago the year after, and Hunt was taken by what he saw. He was particularly drawn to the work of the Spaniard Julio González, whose sculptures translated the biomorphism of modernist abstraction to the third dimension. Hunt once labeled González’s sculptures “drawing in space,” and would come to emulate some of the artist’s innovations himself.

While still in school, Hunt showed his art locally at fairs, earning an audience in the process. After graduating in 1957, he traveled to Europe, then was drafted into the US Army and was forced to return home. Having been stationed in Missouri and Texas, he emerged from his two-year draft in 1960 and moved to New York. But, feeling as though he already he had the art-world connections he needed, he did not remain long.

Amid all his travels, Hunt continued to produce sculptures and prints. In 1958, he made Hero Construction, a sculpture resembling a person whose innards come apart as it grows new limbs. Formed from disused piping and found automobile parts that Hunt welded together, it is owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. “The idea was to suggest a hero, and not to make a hero,” he said in a 2021 interview conducted by curator Jordan Carter.

Other works from the era are composed of unruly copper and steel elements that spider through space, causing them to resemble alien creatures. The welding technique that Hunt used to form them occasionally recalls the work of the Abstract Expressionist David Smith.

Later works would move beyond formalism, into an epic engagement with Black history. Slowly Toward the North (1984), a work owned by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, is a hulking mass that recalls a plow fused with a train; Hunt intended it as a reference to forms of labor Black Southerners took up as they moved north as a part of the Great Migration. Swing Low (2016), a 1,500-pound bronze creation commissioned for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., twists across the ceiling from which it is hung and refers to a famed Black spiritual.

Last month, the market juggernaut White Cube added Hunt to its roster. Sukanya Rajaratnam, the gallery’s global director of strategic marketing initiatives, told ARTnews at the time that Hunt was “a giant hiding in plain sight for decades.”

Hunt is survived by his daughter Cecilia and his sister Marian.

He remained hard-working until the very end. In 2022, with multiple big artworks on the horizon, Hunt was asked if he ever took a day off. “Not if I don’t have to,” he said.

A posting to fierce pussy’s website said Brody had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2021, and they “went through every step of illness and [treatment] as they had lived, with dignity, humor, grit and grace. They remained true to themselves all the way through. Brody died at home, peacefully, surrounded by their loving chosen family.”

The posting begins, “Extraordinary artist, beloved friend, fierce comrade, sister. Gatherer of mushrooms, connoisseur of oils and scents, numerophile, lover of games, agile handstand cartwheel tumbler, itinerant dj, firefighter, dancer, fan of candles and matches, activist, mentor, debonair dresser, native new yorker, poetic list maker… and all these words fail.”

Brody is best-known for their association with fierce pussy, which was formed in 1991 after an ACT UP meeting. At the time, the AIDS crisis had been raging for about a decade; more than 100,000 people had died. Among them were women, but they were rarely, if ever, diagnosed with AIDS. As Gran Fury, another ACT UP-affiliated artist collective, pointed out in a poster from that same year: “WOMEN DON’T GET AIDS…THEY JUST DIE FROM IT.”

With fierce pussy, its members wanted to counter the invisibility of women, lesbians in particular, with regards to HIV/AIDS and AIDS activism. “We did an open call on the floor of ACT UP, for all lesbians who wanted to,” Brody recalled in a 2018 oral history with Svetlana Kitto for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Zoe Leonard, a longtime friend of Brody, joined and hosted one of fierce pussy’s first meetings, as did Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka; these four founding members would reunite in 2008 to relaunch fierce pussy, which remained active until Brody’s death. Other artists who would at one point be members of fierce pussy were Pam Brandt, Jean Carlomusto, Donna Evans, Alison Froling, and Suzanne Wright.

That first meeting would ultimately lead to what would become one of the group’s most iconic series, “List Posters,” which they would quickly wheatpasted across Manhattan, primarily downtown but also in neighborhoods like the Upper West Side. The aesthetic was deliberately lo-fi: blown-up typewritten words. The content, however, was deliberately shocking. “I AM A,” the list would begin, followed by slurs like “lezzie,” “butch,” “bulldagger,” “pervert,” “dyke,” ending with “AND PROUD!” These women wanted to powerfully reclaim the words that had been used against them; they refused to be invisible any longer.

“The worst language that we have is against the female body. … This stuff is real, and that’s why, after all these years, we’re making this work,” fierce pussy, who is quoted as a collective, told ARTnews in 2018, when several of their most well-known works were restaged as part of a commission on the street-facing windows of the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York.

Subsequent works by fierce pussy would continue this aesthetic but adding in pictures, like “Family Pictures and Found Photos,” in which childhood photos of the collective’s members would be paired with phrases like “lover of women” or “find the dyke in this picture.”

In an email to ARTnews, Leslie-Lohman executive director Alyssa Nitchun said, “fierce pussy unapologetically seized space for lesbian visibility in NYC in the early 90s with graphics and poetry that have become a touchstone for generations of queer artists since. Brody and the rest of the collective’s radical and resolutely anti-market ethos with their freely given and infinitely reproducible work, is among the most valued in our collection and in our exhibition history.”

In their solo work, Brody explored the theme of visibility-invisibility differently, looking at how negative space manifested. A series begun around 2011, “Merce Drawings,” shows low-res printouts of photographs of dancers performing works by choreographer Merce Cunningham; to these, Brody has outlined the dancers’ bodies in a simple black line. A series from around the same time took a more painterly approach to this. For it, Brody would paint oddly-shaped pieces of lead with brightly hued oil enamel paint; then, they would embed the works directly into the wall. Both were exhibited at Andrew Kreps Gallery in 2014.

Klaus von Nichtssagend, the Lower East Side gallery, started working with Brody in 2018 and mounted a solo show of their work the following year. (The gallery had been working with Brody to mount a second solo show of new work at the time of their death; it will open in 2024.) For the 2019 show, Brody installed a work titled 18 feet 8 inch Line into the gallery’s wall, which was also activated by a performance by choreographer Kim Brandt.

In an email to ARTnews, the gallery said, “The deceptively simple embedding of a length of thin lead directly in the wall and around a corner of the gallery transformed the visual and psychological space completely, taking what could be seen as an empty room and filling it with vibrating energy and active thought. This reflected the thought that Brody brought to all of their work, which was pared down to elemental honesty and beauty.”

The gallery said the work’s installation, involving several people, spoke to how Brody approached their collaborations: “Brody acted as director, conductor, and choreographer in this process, while everyone at the gallery and several extra helpers who were called in to carefully lift and move the delicate material. It was one of those experiences that reminds us of the meaningfulness of true artistic collaboration and practice.”  

Nancy Brooks Brody was born on September 12, 1962, in Manhattan, and grew up in the Upper West Side. Though they grew up making the family’s holiday cards, Brody said they never had the natural ability to draw: “Drawing for me was always a struggle, and it still is. I’m still that kind of an artist, where it’s not —I don’t have like this God-given ability to render,” they said in the SAAA oral history.

When Brody was around 10 years, their mother enrolled them in a pottery class, and then in middle school they took back-to-back art class periods. That eventually encouraged them to apply and then attend the High School of Music & Art, located on City College’s campus. It was there that they first learned printmaking. “I really loved the repetition. I still really love working in series, and that idea of multiples and being able to apply an image to all different kinds of surfaces,” they said.

After graduating from high school in 1980, Brody briefly attended the School of the Visual Arts, where one of their teachers was sculptor Hannah Wilke. At SVA, they also met Mario Fernandez and Nina Seigenfeld, who founded New Math Gallery in 1983. They would have their first solo at the East Village gallery the following year. Through mutual friends, they met photographer Zoe Leonard, who became a close friend. “She agreed to be a live sculpture in my first exhibition, where I covered her in clay” for the opening reception, Brooks said.

Lead sculptures by Richard Serra or Joseph Beuys’s Fat Chair (1964–85), were “making me aware of negative space in a certain way … it’s funny because I hadn’t thought about this. But I still am very much interested in negative space in space, and the body in relation to it,” they said.

Brody didn’t get involved in AIDS activism until the late ’80s after they attended an ACT UP demonstration at City Hall. “By then, I had known that people were dying, and that this thing was upon us,” they said. “I didn’t understand it in full, but I knew enough to want to go to this protest about it, you know, and demand. And I was amazed by this, all this outrage, and amazed by all these—you know, this gathering of people, with all this knowledge and information.”

They soon began regularly attending ACT UP meetings on Monday nights; Leonard was also attending them and soon they met two of fierce pussy’s other founding members Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka. Brody would become an active member in ACT UP, attending protests like the Day of Desperation in 1991, in which the group effectively shut down Grand Central Station during rush hour as well as working with some of its advocacy programs. “With ACT UP, I was definitely involved in—I was interested in how AIDS manifested in women, and how it manifested differently in women.”

In her email, Nitchun, the Leslie-Lohman director, added, “Nancy Brooks Brody gifted our world and our queer communities with their radical creativity while creating a path for newer generations of queer artists interested in exploring the phenomenological space of the body through drawing, architecture, and time. By invoking the corporeal outside the space of figuration, Brody gave us new ways to self-define queerness and the queer body.”

Long before many others did so, Molnár embraced computers, which she used to create spare, minimalist drawings that were made according to sets of rules that she engineered. These drawings flirt with the points where order breaks down into chaos and chaos coheres into order.

During the 1960s, while in Paris, she began creating algorithms by hand and producing drawings through them. She termed this method “machine imaginaire,” or “imaginary machine,” a reference to the fact that she had not yet been able to utilize a digital computer.

Then, in 1968, her work took a turn when she did finally gain access to a computer at the Sorbonne, the esteemed French university. She approached the head of a computing center there and asked if she could use their machine to create art. She recalled his flippant reaction in an interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist: “I said yes to you because I thought of a famous quote by Voltaire, the one where he says: ‘I completely disagree with everything that you are saying but will defend until my death your right to do or say or write what you have in mind.'”

The drawings that Molnár would go on to create were made by outfitting a computer with a pen and feeding it instructions on how to go about its work. These works, some of which were produced with her husband, the artist François Molnár, are so simple-looking that they belie the amount of labor taken to get her computer to act accordingly.

“Interruptions,” the series she began producing in 1968, were crafted using FORTRAN, an early computer programming language. She would set up a series of straight lines, then rotate some, causing her rigorous set of marks to be thrown out of alignment. Then, to inject further chaos, she would randomly erase certain portions, resulting in blank areas amid a sea of lines.

Yet Molnár admitted to knowing very little about programming—even if she did learn how punch cards work and was proficient in BASIC before others. “In life, you can’t do everything,” she told Right Click Save in 2022. “You always have to choose. And for me, my primary interest was always painting — putting blobs onto a piece of paper in some sort of order. And then the algorithm comes in.”

Vera Molnár was born in 1924 in Budapest, Hungary. When she was a child, her uncle, a Sunday painter, gave her a box of pastels, and she proceeded to produce an image of Lake Balaton that she described as “minimalist,” returning repeatedly to depict the lake at sunset. But these works, despite being some of the ones that Molnár described as being important to her creative growth, were ultimately lost during World War II.

She attended the Budapest College of Fine Arts to study painting, but when she first began as a student, the school was still under the control of the National Socialist Party. Professors were “indoctrinating me with the idea that Picasso was degrading women by painting them like that,” as she recalled in her interview with Obrist. Then, once the war ended, the school’s program shifted, and she was exposed to the avant-garde. She graduated in 1947, moving to Paris the year afterward.

In the French capital, she became a part of a rich artistic community of émigrés that included Constantin Brancusi, Wassily Kandinsky, and Victor Vasarely. That last artist, whose mind-bending abstract paintings appear to warp before viewers’ eyes, would spur on Molnár in the following decades.

Vasarely’s impact on her cohort became obvious when Molnár, Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, and others whose work messed with perception formed the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV), a short-lived but important collective that sought to lure science into art-making. Light art, kinetic art, and other experimental work resulted, gaining the attention of many in France and beyond. These works disabused traditional-minded critics of the notion that art must remain static; their use of industrial materials in non-industrial settings helped lay the groundwork for Minimalism.

But Molnár stood apart from the rest of GRAV’s members: she was the lone woman in a collective that was otherwise all male, and she was interested in the prospect of using computers. The others were less enamored of the thought of utilizing the technology. She left not long after the group’s founding in 1960, but she remained friendly with artists like Morellet.

After she gained access to a computer, Molnár’s work would grow increasingly offbeat. Her “(Des)Ordres” works, from 1974, involved creating a pattern of concentric squares that appear to pop in and out of line, depending on what information Molnár inputted. She would build on that series with the “Hypertransformations” (1975–76), a series of squares set within squares, all produced using a pen that never leaves its paper. In some, these squares appear to quiver; in others, they remain more fixed. What resulted changed based on how Molnár shifted their vertices.

While some reacted with disgust to these works, which may have appeared totally out of step with history, Molnár implicitly asserted that they could be related to modernist abstraction by producing homages to Claude Monet and Piet Mondrian—with the help of a computer, naturally.

Some works were also distinctly personal. During the ’80s, when Molnár was able to acquire a computer for usage at home, she fed her mother’s handwriting into a plotter, producing Cy Twombly–like scribbles. Some viewed these as romantic tributes to her mother, but Molnár saw them differently, as formal études having to do with making a form “crescendo” as it moves from left to right.

After NFTs went mainstream in 2021, an interest in digital art followed, and Molnár’s work suddenly began to receive attention in areas it had rarely been noticed. She was included in the 2022 Venice Biennale, where she was the oldest living participant, and she even produced 500 NFTs for Sotheby’s in 2023 that cumulatively brought in $1.2 million.

Ahead of their sale, Michael Bouhanna, head of digital art and NFTs at the auction house, said, “Vera Molnár is one of the undisputed legends of generative art, whose decades of experimentation with the form has paved the way for what we know of today as algorithm-based digital art.”

Despite her influence on generations of artists devoted to technology, Molnár was fairly modest about her own significance.

She told Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Listen, I can’t say it any other way: what makes me happy is getting up in the morning, making myself some tea, picking up a pencil… and I’m completely bowled over by this joy that a pencil leaves on paper when you move it around. And that’s not even art yet, it’s nothing, but it’s leaving a mark, making something that hadn’t existed until then.”

The French publication Le Quotidien de l’Art reported that Honoré had died on Wednesday and that the cause of his death was still being investigated by the police. The report cited several relatives who said that Honoré had died by suicide.

MO.CO Montepellier, the French museum where Honoré served as head of exhibitions, confirmed Honoré’s death on Friday morning. In a statement posted to social media, the museum wrote, “Today we lose an extraordinary and inspiring colleague who will leave a huge void in our community. His legacy will live on through all the exhibitions he designed, like the current one by Huma Bhabha, and the young artists he mentored and supported. During this difficult time, our thoughts are with his family, loved ones and everyone else who had the privilege of working alongside him.”

Across the past two and a half decades, Honoré amassed a reputation for staging exhibitions of cutting-edge art, much of it by women and queer artists. “I consider exhibitions as open systems and I think that is something that can definitely be read in my work,” he said in an interview with This Is Tomorrow. “Overall, I like proposing introductions, rather than conclusions. I like things that are unresolved.”

He started his curatorial career in 2000 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and would go on to hold positions at London institutions, like Tate Modern, the David Roberts Arts Foundation, and the Hayward Gallery, before joining MO.CO Montpellier in southern France.

Among the celebrated exhibitions that he mounted was “DRAG: Self-Portrait and Body Politics,” which he curated in 2018 for the Hayward Gallery, where he was senior curator at the time. Featuring works by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Sin Wai Kin, and others, the show sought to show how artists—both queer and not—had incorporated drag into their work. “This timely exhibition examines how the way we look, at ourselves and at others, has been conditioned by a series of gendered, racial, class and colonial structures,” Apollo wrote in its review.

“Kiss My Genders,” a show Honoré staged the year after at the Hayward Gallery, sought to explore gender fluidity through works by Juliana Huxtable, Kent Monkman, Catherine Opie, and more, and also received positive reviews. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones awarded the exhibition five stars, writing that it “touches, in profound ways, on what it is to be human, and why we need this great river of the unfixed.”

He also organized solo shows for artists such as Neïl Beloufa, Hans Haacke, Ana Mendieta, Pierre Huyghe, Jeff Wall, Fiona Banner, and many more, as well as the 13th edition of the Baltic Triennial in 2018.

In addition to curating, Honoré wrote criticism, contributing to Mousse regularly, and started his own journal, Drawing Room Confessions, which enlisted artists such as Miriam Cahn and David Lamelas for drawing-oriented projects.

“I really believe an art museum should be a stage on which events are happening,” he said in an interview for the website Art Map London. “It should not be a temple and it should not be an amusement park. Displaying an artwork is an event, a talk is an event, and they create memories. Therefore, a museum is made of memories and when we leave it we should be filled with these memories.”

The Magnum photography collective, of which he was a part, announced his passing on Thursday. The Magnum announcement said that Erwitt died at his home, surrounded by his family. It did not specify a cause of death.

Marilyn Monroe vamping in a hotel room, Jackie Kennedy mourning a slain John F. Kennedy, a couple caught kissing in the side view mirror of a car, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev engage in tense conversation: these are among the countless subjects that Erwitt captured with a nearly unparalleled wit. They have appeared in books and as posters and postcards, and have been seen widely in art institutions across the globe.

Shooting in sumptuous black and white, Erwitt was among those who defined documentary photography during the postwar era. Working both on commission for publications and for his own purposes, he managed to make well-known subjects seem new, mysterious, and seductive.

But for a photographer whose work is so esteemed, Erwitt was often modest about his achievements and his methods. He spoke in short, clipped statements that belied just how refined his compositions were.

What were his main interests? Dogs and people, he once told the Guardian. How did he work so prolifically? By having a camera on him at all times and using a fast shutter speed, he repeatedly explained.

Erwitt stated that his artistic guide was Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer whose modernist shots emphasized rigorous compositions discovered on the fly. Erwitt, too, discovered the way his pictures would look as he went, remaining open to chance.

One of his Marilyn Monroe photographs, for example, was taken while she was working on the film Some Like It Hot. Rather than telling her how to pose, as some photographers might, Erwitt observed her. “I like the atmosphere, and the fact that it’s a famous person being photographed in an ordinary way,” he said.

Elliott Erwitt was born in Paris in 1928 to Russian parents, though he would move to the US before he was even a teenager, in 1939. He would take up photography in the decade afterward, and then go on to study the medium, along with filmmaking, in college. He graduated in 1950, only to be drafted into the US Army the year after.

Unlike some of his colleagues, Erwitt was sent not to Korea, where the US was involved in war, but to Verdun, France, where he was stationed at the PX. There he met his first wife, Lucienne Van Kan, whom he would marry in 1953 and divorce in 1960. (He had three more wives: Diana Dann, Susan Ringo, and Pia Frankenberg; he was unmarried at the time of his death.)

Before being drafted, Erwitt had already linked up with some pillars of postwar photography, including Robert Capa and Roy Stryker, whom Erwitt credited with having given him his first big break. By the time Erwitt was discharged in 1953, those connections had come in handy. That same year, Capa founded Magnum, and Erwitt was invited to join.

Erwitt would go on to photograph for some of the most preeminent publications of the moment, including Look and Life, which were prized for their photojournalistic offerings. And in the decades afterward, Erwitt’s assignments took him far and wide, from Cuba to Argentina, from Las Vegas to Birmingham, England.

Certain of his pictures have become so widely available that many may not even know that Erwitt shot them: a photo of a man with an umbrella leaping before the Eiffel Tower, for example, or a shot of a woman seated on a New York stoop who is posed so that her head is replaced by her snaggle-toothed dog’s.

Canine companions were a constant in Erwitt’s photography. He shot them leaping, lounging in the trunks of cars, contemplating crashing waves on beaches, and gazing upward adoringly at their owners. He produced several photobooks deovted specifically to dogs, some of which were his own.

Last year, the photography blog PetaPixel asked him why he was so interested in dogs. Erwitt’s response: “Because they don’t ask for photos.”

“The art world is losing an important representative of the first generation of conceptual art from the 1960s in New York,” the gallery wrote in a statement.

Like many others associated with the Conceptualist movement, Anastasi was known for quirky, self-reflexive artworks that were made using idiosyncratic sets of rules. These works, which took the form of drawings, video installations, paintings, and texts, earned him the respect of many in the ’60s and ’70s, from trailblazing gallerist Virginia Dwan to the experimental composer John Cage, with whom Anastasi played chess regularly.

Anastasi’s most famous works are his “blind drawings,” begun in 1963 and which he continued making throughout much of his career. Using a pencil, Anastasi would create Cy Twombly–like scrawls on a sheet of paper under certain sets of parameters. His “Subway Drawings” were made while riding the subway and crafted only in the time it took to reach his destination; often, they contain written notes about where he was headed. He donned a pair of headphones and shut his eyes, and as the train lurched forward, his pencil would skitter and move around, leaving the results of the drawings open to chance. He also produced blind drawings while walking, and even attempted to make some while running.

Works like these earned Anastasi the respect of critics, even if he failed to achieve the broader fame of many of his Conceptualist colleagues. “A Conceptualist’s Conceptualist who has been around since the 1960’s, William Anastasi has not, in his supporters’ eyes, been accorded the recognition he deserves,” critic Grace Glueck once wrote in the New York Times. “And in truth, as a Duchamp heir he is one of the best of the Conceptual breed, witty and searching without the didacticism that makes some Conceptual work so boring.”

His shows with Virginia Dwan Gallery during the ’60s earned Anastasi attention in New York. The first exhibition ever held at that gallery, in 1966, was a solo presentation of Anastasi’s “Sound Objects,” sculptural pieces that took the form of ready-made objects exhibited with the sounds they normally produced when activated.

His follow-up exhibition, in 1967, featured Six Sites, in which silkscreened prints based on the gallery’s walls were exhibited at 90 percent of their actual size. The work created an odd mismatch between art and life, and accepted that the two rarely sync up properly.

William Anastasi was born in 1933 in Philadelphia. In interviews, he recalled that his mother, a Sicilian of Algerian descent, believed that becoming an artist was an ideal pursuit, and so Anastasi felt the career wasn’t for him.

But when he was 12, he attended a free art lesson at what is now known as the Fleisher Art Memorial and came away with his drawing having been deemed the best one made that day. Overjoyed by the reception, he returned the next weekend for a second class and received some negative criticism from his teacher. “I looked up at him,” Anastasi recalled in a Brooklyn Rail interview, “and said, believe it or not, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ I now knew what ‘devastated’ means—I never went back to those classes again.” He didn’t sign a drawing until 1960.

When he came to New York in 1962, he started out as a masonry contractor and a brickwork salesman, but he had plans to become an artist. Within a couple years, he would go on to achieve that goal with the help of Philip Guston. The painter had come across some works Anastasi had produced by placing plaster on tar paper and recommended that the influential dealer Betty Parsons begin showing him. She would do so, mounting five Anastasi solo shows. “Extraordinarily strong, positive writing reflected some of those shows,” Anastasi recalled in 2010, “but buyers were not impressed.”

Artists, however, were drawn to Anastasi’s shows. According to Anastasi, Marcel Duchamp himself stopped by one and loved it.

In later decades, Anastasi would continue to apply his “blind” technique to painting. One series from the 1980s featured all-over backgrounds painted with his eyes closed. On top of them, Anastasi painted parts of words appropriated from the Viking Press edition of James Joyce’s 1939 novel Finnegans Wake. “They are not so much revivals of abstract art (not, that is, neo-abstraction) as parodies of it, works of Conceptual art (word paintings) with the design appeal of traditional abstract art built into them,” the art historian Thomas McEvilley wrote in Artforum.

Anastasi never found mainstream fame—not that he seemed to care much. “I am now certain that an early financial success would have been an obstacle to a steady and normal development,” he said in 2009. “At present this sort of success has come my way, but it has not diminished my decades-old identification with a remark from the beginning of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ‘Nearly through the whole of my work I have felt doubtful what to do.'”

His brother Roy confirmed his passing, saying that the artist had been battling brain cancer.

Over the past three decades, Bailey assembled an influential body of work that located objects he collected within a continuum of Black history. Tintypes from his family’s archive, Georgian red clay, shipping tarp, and African figurines were among the many elements that appeared in his art, which primarily took the form of sculptural installations, some of which were monumental in scale.

His 2009–11 installation Windward Coast, featuring 35,000 piano keys set on the floor with a Black man’s head peeking out of the pile, is among his most well-known works. With a rumbling soundtrack emitting from a conch shell, the piece evokes the precariousness of Black life, the deeply felt pain resulting from slavery that resounds across the centuries, and the impact that sound and music have held for Bailey and other members of his community.

“An ocean is something that divides people,” Bailey told the New York Times in 2011, the year a survey of his work was staged at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. (The show also traveled to the Wellesley College museum in Massachusetts and the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas.) “Music is something that connects people. Duke Ellington or Thelonious Monk—it’s a different sound that takes you somewhere else. It’s also about being at peace.”

Michael Rooks, a curator of modern and contemporary art at that museum, told the Times in the same profile that Bailey was “probably the most prominent living artist here in Atlanta.”

Within Georgia’s capital, Bailey’s art was widely seen and well-loved. For the Cascade Nature Preserve, he created a concrete amphitheater that has been used to mount plays and concerts. For the city’s airport, he made Saints, a 40-foot-long commission that features photographs of his relatives that are set within an abstract patterning and among a Kongo cosmogram, a symbol that recurs in the Bakongo religion and signifies a circular transference between this world and spiritual realms.

Saints, like other of Bailey’s works, situates his own family within lineages that extend across millennia. “For me, it’s helpful to remember your tracks,” Bailey told ARTnews earlier this year. Bailey meant this both literally and figuratively, given that railroads formed a recurring element in his family history.

Radcliffe Bailey was born in 1968 in Bridgetown, New Jersey, and moved to Atlanta when he was young. His father was a railroad engineer, and his family had been involved with the Underground Railroad that helped secretly transport Southern enslaved people to the North. An interest in travel remained with Bailey. “I’ve always been fascinated by different forms of travel—by sea, by train, or into outer space and other realms,” he told Art in America in 2021.

During his childhood, Bailey visited the High Museum, where he once met the artist Jacob Lawrence; he also drew inspiration from his grandfather, a deacon at a Virginia church who built birdcages in his spare time. Bailey pursued baseball as a teenager, even playing semipro at one point, but he realized he did not have the right body type for the sport in the long-term and chose art instead. He attended the Atlanta College of Art as an undergraduate, but unlike most practicing artists in the US today, he did not seek a master’s degree.

As he was thinking about grad school, he visited Abstract Expressionist painter Grace Hartigan at the Maryland Institute, where he considered enrolling. “What the hell do you want to come here for?” Bailey recalled her telling him. “You need to go do your work!” He went back to Atlanta and remained there.

In college, Bailey trained as a sculptor, with the idea of producing large outdoor works: he even acted as assistant to sculptor Melvin Edwards. Still, he initially produced paintings. “It was easier to move painting than sculpture, and my work has always fallen between the two,” he explained in a BOMB interview. “Some people see me as a painter, but I don’t see myself as a painter or a sculptor, just an artist.”

The works for which Bailey first became known during the ’90s incorporate tintypes from family albums he inherited from his grandmother. These works point toward historical connections that extend far beyond his own lineage. Strangest Fruit (1997), for example, features an aged photograph of a seated man holding a cane; its title alludes to the 1939 Billie Holiday song that refers to lynchings.

Later works would grow more and more expansive. Nommo (2019), an installation that he produced for the 2019 Istanbul Biennial, is a reconstruction of the hull of the Clotilda, the last ship to transport enslaved West Africans to Alabama, 52 years after the practice was outlawed in the United States. Casts of a plaster bust that Bailey purchased from a Belgian dealer rest on wooden plinths and bases. As in other Bailey works, it has sound elements: jazz music plays from one source, and from another, the sounds of shipbuilders at work and ocean waves recorded in the Bay of Soumbédioune, in Dakar, Senegal. The title refers to a deity associated with the Dogon religion.

The last few years saw Bailey transition back to painting, producing abstractions that obliquely alluded to some of his prior themes, with tracks crossing stretched tarps. “I always thought the surreal was real to Black people, and in that way, I wanted to represent these two different worlds,” he said in the Art in America interview. “The abstraction in the paintings now—that was always a layer that existed in the earlier work, but I may have covered it up with a photograph. Now I’ve peeled back the layers, and I’m figuring out how to work in several different ways, as opposed to having the photograph as an anchor.”

Bailey is survived by his wife Leslie Parks Bailey, his daughter Olivia, his son Coles, and his parents Radcliffe Sr. and Brenda.

“Radcliffe was a true force, creating work that resonated with so many on a profoundly intellectual and emotional level,” Jack Shainman Gallery, the New York enterprise that had long represented him, said in a statement. “We could not be more appreciative of the years we’ve spent collaborating as colleagues, though above all, we are beyond grateful for the friendship that has blossomed from our time together.”