Categotry Archives: Artists

Dorothy Miller had exquisite taste in art.
Miller, one of the first curators hired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was responsible for pioneering exhibitions of new American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella and Jasper Johns.
In 1942, Miller put on her first “American” show, which exhibited a selection of unknown artists with eclectic backgrounds and styles. That first show was panned, but many of the artists she featured went on to become giants in the field.
Although she retired from MOMA in 1969, Miller continued to serve the art community by participating on the advisory board that determined the World Trade Center’s featured artwork. Most of these pieces were lost in the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks.
Miller died on Friday. Cause of death was not released. She was 99.

Rosalie Thorne McKenna, a photographer best known for taking pictures of American and British literati, died on June 14. Cause of death was not released. She was 84.

McKenna first picked up a camera when she was 30 years old. Although she planned to take pictures of Italian Renaissance architecture, McKenna became interested in portrait photography after taking pictures of London-based writers and artists for the Poetry Center in New York.

For the next three decades, McKenna took pictures of many writers, including Truman Capote, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound and Robert Frost. Dylan Thomas was one of her favorite subjects. She featured him in the film, “The Days of Dylan Thomas,” and published “Portrait of Dylan: A Photographer’s Memoir.”

String. Yarn. Wire. These were the simple items Fred Sandback turned into art.

As a youth, Sandback made stringed instruments like dulcimers and banjos. But when he matured, he turned his strings into art by sculpting with yarn and painting with string. His work has been featured in galleries in Dusseldorf and Cologne, Germany, and at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

“The first sculpture I made with a piece of string and a little wire was the outline of a rectangular solid … lying on the floor. It was a casual act, but it seemed to open up a lot of possibilities for me,” Sandback wrote in 1986.

Sandback committed suicide on June 23. He was 59.

Moshe Kupferman, a leading Israeli abstract artist, died on Friday of a heart attack. He was 77.
Kupferman exhibited his paintings at the Paris’ Musee National d’Art Moderne, the International Art Fair in Basel, Switzerland and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Last year, Jerusalem’s Israel Museum held a major retrospective of his art.