©Lorraine O’Grady/Courtesy Lorraine O’Grady Trust
There were times in 2024 when it felt as though an entire chapter of art history was being lost. Crack open a modern art textbook, and note how many figures from the section on Minimalism died this year alone: Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Richard Serra. Stella and Serra’s deaths, plus those of artists working at the same time like Faith Ringgold and Jackie Winsor, recently moved critic Barry Schwabsky to ask if an entire New York scene had died this year as well.
It wasn’t just artists in New York who died this year, of course. Giants of other countries also passed: the German sculptor Rebecca Horn, the Austrian performance artist Günter Brus, the Saudi Arabian painter Safeya Binzagr, the Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe.
And it wasn’t just artists, either. Dealers Barbara Gladstone and Pierre Levai died this year, along with collectors Rosa de la Cruz and Leonard Riggio, curator Kasper König, and art historian David Anfam.
Below, a look back at some of the most notable art-world figures who died in 2024.
Read more of our “2024: Year in Review” coverage here.
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Lorraine O’Grady
Image Credit: Photo Marc Dimov/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images Lorraine O’Grady, a conceptual artist who made work about the intersections between art and life, Blackness and femininity, and the past and the present, died in December at 90. She staged daredevil performances in which she confronted bourgeois norms, penned treatises about the historical exclusion of Black female perspectives from the canon, and occasionally protested as an activist, donning a gorilla mask as an official member of the feminist Guerrilla Girls collective.
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Frank Stella
Image Credit: Photo Nic Antaya for Boston Globe via Getty Images Frank Stella, an artist who paved the way for Minimalism before turning his work maximalist, died in May at 87. He remains well-known for his “Black Paintings” of the 1950s, in which evenly spaced white lines create patterns against black backgrounds, though he has also gained an audience for monumentally scaled sculptures that explode with color.
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Richard Serra
Image Credit: Redferns Richard Serra, a Minimalist sculptor whose gigantic creations defined an era of art-making in New York, died in March at 85. His sculptures were often made of monumental sheets of steel that arced around viewers, inducing claustrophobia and awe in equal measure.
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Jackie Winsor
Jackie Winsor, an artist known for her labor-intensive sculptures, died in September at 82. Working alongside the Minimalists during the 1970s, she crafted objects from wood, copper, and cement; the pieces seemed to contain mysteries that remained unknowable to viewers.
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Barbara Gladstone
Image Credit: Shawn Ehlers/WireImage, Via Getty Images Barbara Gladstone, one of the foremost New York gallerists, died in June at 89. She opened her dealership, Gladstone Gallery, in 1980, and would go on to make stars out of artists such as Matthew Barney, Jenny Holzer, and Richard Prince.
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Carl Andre
Image Credit: Getty Images Carl Andre, a leading light of the Minimalist art movement of the 1960s and ’70s, died in January at 88. He gained acclaim during that period for sculptures composed of evenly sized firebricks, a way of bringing art “close to zero,” as he once put it. His death revived interest in the 1985 death of his partner, the artist Ana Mendieta, who fell from his apartment’s window; Andre was acquitted after facing a murder trial.
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Faith Ringgold
Image Credit: Photo Anthony Barboza/Getty Images Faith Ringgold, a pioneering artist who upheld Black women’s perspectives, died in April at 93. Across figurative paintings, painted quilts, children’s books, and impassioned protests, Ringgold combated racism and misogyny while also making space in the canon for Black women like herself.
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Fathi Ghaben
Image Credit: Via Palestinian Achievements on X Fathi Ghaben, a painter known for his colorful images of the resilient Palestinian spirit, died in March at 77. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, Ghaben died because he was suffering from chronic chest and lung illness, and had been unable to seek medical help from a medical system hobbled by Israel’s war in Gaza.
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Brent Sikkema
Image Credit: Photo Will Ragozzino/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images Brent Sikkema, a New York gallerist who boosted the profiles of well-known artists such as Kara Walker and Jeffrey Gibson, died in January at 75. Sikkema, a founder of the New York gallery Sikkema Jenkins & Co., was found stabbed to death in his Rio de Janeiro apartment, setting off an investigation that is still ongoing.
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Frank Auerbach
Image Credit: Photo Michael Ward/Rex Features/Getty Images Frank Auerbach, one of the most acclaimed British artists of the 20th century, died in November at 93. He redefined portraiture, laying paint on so thickly that his works appeared sculptural and abstract.
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Gary Indiana
Image Credit: Photo Catherine McGann/Getty Images Gary Indiana, a writer whose prickly art criticism for the Village Voice during the 1980s was widely read, frequently imitated, and rarely matched, died in October at 74. He also wrote a range of beloved novels, many of which were only reissued recently, after years of being out of print, and exhibited his art during the final stages of his career.
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Keiichi Tanaami
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist, Nanzuka, and Venus Over Manhattan Keiichi Tanaami, an artist who processed postwar trauma via collages and films composed of a barrage of appropriated images, died in August at 88. He is currently the subject of a survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami that features some of his final works, in which characters lifted from Picasso paintings appear to mutate.
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Rebecca Horn
Image Credit: Photo Michael Latz/DDP/AFP via Getty Images Rebecca Horn, one of Germany’s most acclaimed artists, died in September at 80. Her unclassifiable performances and sculptures tended to center around women’s bodies, though Horn’s art rarely communicated in direct statements. Instead, she often enlisted mysterious objects in situations that spoke to fractured selves and damaged psyches.
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Rosa de la Cruz
Image Credit: Courtesy the de la Cruz Collection Rosa de la Cruz, a Miami-based collector who amassed a significant collection of conceptual art, died in February at 81. The Miami art space she ran with her husband Carlos helped put the Floridian city on the map; that space closed this year, and its building will soon be taken over by the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami. Her collection included key works by artists such as Ana Mendieta, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Christina Quarles, and Glenn Ligon.
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Bill Viola
Image Credit: Photo James Keyser/Getty Images Bill Viola, a video artist who helped define the course of his medium with works pondering death and the passage of time, died in July at 73. Having started with lo-fi videotapes, Viola later became known for installations that induce self-reflection and epic multichannel works featuring resurrections, bursts of water, and art-historical allusions.
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Richard Mayhew
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist’s estate and Venus Over Manhattan Richard Mayhew, a painter whose abstractions often resembled semi-imagined landscapes, died in September at 100. He said he used “landscape as a metaphor to express emotion” and relied upon an expressive color palette.
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Zilia Sánchez
Image Credit: Photo Raquel Perez Puig Zilia Sánchez, an abstractionist known for her shaped paintings that protrude outward, creating forms that resembled female bodies, died in December at 98. A queer Cuban-born woman who lived in self-imposed exile in Puerto Rico, she gained widespread recognition in the final decade of her career, when her art appeared in two Venice Biennales.
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Kasper König
Image Credit: ullstein bild via Getty Images Kasper König, a curator who altered the German scene forever with his boundary-pushing projects, died in August at 80. In addition to founding Frankfurt’s Portikus museum and directing the Museum Ludwig, he established Skulptur Projekte Münster, an exhibition of monumentally scaled sculpture that takes place once a decade.
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Safeya Binzagr
Image Credit: Tessa Solomon/ARTnews Safeya Binzagr, one of the most important artists in Saudi Arabia, died in September at 86. Though famous in her home country for her paintings and fabric pieces, she was also notable for launching a cultural center in 1995 in Jeddah, a city that had no other institution like it at the time.
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Audrey Flack
Image Credit: Getty Images Audrey Flack, a Photorealist painter whose large-scale canvases raised the everyday and the déclassé to the status of high art, died in June at 93. Toward the end of her career, she focused on creating “Post-Pop-Baroque” paintings filled with a tumult of things, an attempt, she said, at “bringing back the masters.”
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Sarah Cunningham
Image Credit: Courtesy Lisson Gallery Sarah Cunningham, a painter known in England for her abstracted landscapes, died in November at 31. At the time of her passing, Cunningham had been on the cusp of fame, having just gained representation with Lisson Gallery. Shortly before her death was confirmed by British police, she had gone missing in London.
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June Leaf
Image Credit: Photo Brian Graham/Courtesy Hyphen June Leaf, an artist whose unclassifiable work pondered the limits of figuration, died in July at 94. She described herself as “a painter who had to have a tactile experience with the world,” and is most fondly remembered for sculptures that jump into motion upon being triggered. Her art had developed a cult following over the years, and her fan base is poised to expand in 2025 with a retrospective that will tour the US.
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Destiny Deacon
Image Credit: Photo Michael Clayton-Jones/Fairfax Media via Getty Images Destiny Deacon, an Aboriginal artist who dealt head-on with racism in her photographs and installations, died in May at 67. Within Australia, she was most famous for her pictures of dolls intended to demean Aboriginal people. Those toys, she said, “represent us as people, because white Australia didn’t come to terms with us as people.”
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Dinh Q. Lê
Image Credit: Photo Jonathan Wong/South China Morning Post via Getty Images Dinh Q. Lê, an artist known for challenging pieces about trauma and the loss of history in Vietnam, died in April at 56. Though the vast majority of his oeuvre took the form of conceptual photography, he is most famous for The Farmers and the Helicopters, a 2006 video installation about American representations of the war in Vietnam.
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Lucas Samaras
Image Credit: Courtesy Pace Gallery Lucas Samaras, an artist who sliced, diced, fragmented, and warped images of himself in mind-altering artworks, died in March at 87. He worked across a variety of mediums, from installation art to photography, and gained acclaim during the 1960s for “Boxes,” sculptures studded with pins, razors, and shards, sometimes with camera-made pictures inset in the objects’ surfaces.
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Ben Vautier
Image Credit: Photo Jean-François Monier/AFP via Getty Images Ben Vautier, a French artist associated with the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, died in June at 88. In expansive installations and paintings scrawled with cursive text, he showed that any division between life and art was inherently false. “Everything is art,” he frequently proclaimed.
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Pierre Levai
Image Credit: Getty Images Pierre Levai, the longtime leader of the New York branch of Marlborough Gallery, died in June at 87. With Levai at the helm, Marlborough mounted key presentations of work by Philip Guston, Marisol, Alex Katz, and many more during the postwar era. The 80-year-old London-based gallery began winding down operations the same month that Levai died.
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Dorothy Lichtenstein
Image Credit: Photo Jack Mitchell/Getty Images Dorothy Lichtenstein, the longtime leader of a foundation devoted to her husband, the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, died in July at 84. When that foundation began the process of shutting down in 2018, she helped disperse a number of works to institutions such as the Whitney Museum, currently the owner of hundreds of works by Roy and the organizer of a retrospective for him due to open in 2026.
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Lillian Schwartz
Image Credit: Henry Ford Museum, Gift of the Lillian F. Schwartz & Laurens R. Schwartz Collection Lillian Schwartz, a trailblazing computer artist, died in October at 97. Her films of the 1970s that enlisted computer-generated imagery have influenced generations of filmmakers and artists after her. She also holds a special place in history as the first female artist in residence at Bell Labs.
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Patti Astor
Image Credit: Photo Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images Patti Astor, a core member of the Downtown New York scene of the 1980s, died in April at 74. She ran the short-lived but influential Fun Gallery, which offered Jean-Michel Basqiuat, Kenny Scharf, Lee Quiñones, Fab 5 Freddy, and others some of their first major exposure.
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Marian Zazeela
Image Credit: Photo Will Ragozzino/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images Marian Zazeela, an artist whose Dream House installation, produced with her husband La Monte Young, remains a point of pilgrimage in New York, died in March at 83. Working solo, she also made trippy drawings that she called “borderline art” because of the way that they disturb the “conventional distinction between decorative and fine art by using decorative elements in the fine art tradition.”
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Walter Dahn
Image Credit: Photo Andrea Stappert Walter Dahn, a member of the Junge Wilde group of German artists of the 1970s, died in November at 70. His intentionally inelegant painterly style gained him an early appearance in Documenta and a range of admirers, including the artist Richard Prince.
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Farhad Moshiri
Image Credit: Courtesy The Third Line, Dubai. Photo: Claire Dorn. Farhad Moshiri, an Iranian artist who filtered Persian tradition through a Pop art sensibility, died in July at 61. He often collaborated with craftswomen for projects that recreated photographs in thread.
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Jacqueline de Jong
Image Credit: Photostudio Koos Breukel/Courtesy Ortuzar Projects, New York Jacqueline de Jong, a Dutch painter who revolutionized figurative painting over and over again, died in June at 85. She briefly ran the journal of the Situationist movement of the 1960s before launching a career as a painter. It was not until recently, however, that she gained recognition for her work beyond Situationism.
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David Anfam
Image Credit: Getty Images David Anfam, an art historian who rewrote the history of Abstract Expressionism, died in August at 69. He is widely credited with reshaping the way scholars understand the art of Mark Rothko, whose work Anfam compiled into a 1998 catalogue raisonné.
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Leonard Riggio
Image Credit: Photo Skip Bolen/WireImage Leonard Riggio, the Barnes & Noble founder who collected significant works by Willem de Kooning, Richard Serra, and more, died in August at 83. He helped transform Dia:Beacon, a haven for Minimalism in Upstate New York, with a $30 million gift that helped support the acquisition of the museum’s famed Serra sculptures.
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Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt
Image Credit: Photo Christoph Soeder/dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, a German mail artist, died in February at 92. Working in East Berlin before the fall of the Soviet regime, she produced papers lined with dazzling arrays of typewritten text that she posted across the world.
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Eikoh Hosoe
Image Credit: Photo Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images Eikoh Hosoe, an artist who steered Japanese photography in a new direction, died in September at 91. During the 1960s, he famously photographed the writer Yukio Mishima, whom he pictured in states of extreme submission and domination.
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Alexis Smith
Image Credit: Photo Pauline Stella Sanchez, 2017 Alexis Smith, an artist who explored (and subverted) Californian mythology, died in January at 74. She frequently recycled found images in installations, collages, and paintings that exposed the seedy underbelly of Hollywood.
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Yong Soon Min
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist Yong Soon Min, an artist who pondered how her identity had been reshaped by her move to the United States from her home country of Korea, died in March at 70. Her photographs and installations were influential to generations of Los Angeles artists who came up after her, some of whom she personally fostered as an educator.
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Günter Brus
Image Credit: Getty Images Günter Brus, an Austrian provocateur associated with the Viennese Actionist movement of the 1960s, died in February at 85. He often used his body for performances such as The Real Test (1970), for which he repeatedly cut himself with a razor until he passed out from exhaustion.
