In Memoriam

“John wrote many novels, poems and plays, including Second Best’s a Gay Goodnight, and Go Out and See, which starred his close friend Warren Finnerty (OBIE winner for his role in The Connection).”

-Legacy.com, July 19, 2020

From a 2002 article: “Don Ahn is a Korean-American whose Eastern sensibilities permeate the canvases that he paints in his New York studio. A mood of serenity exists in Ahn’s paintings, juxtaposed with motion and vibrant colors, which demands attention. These colors, combined with the artist’s wide brushstrokes and the way that he splatters and drips paint, all lend to the fluidity and movement in his canvases. Ahn has lived and worked in the United States since the early 1960s, and his work is in collections that include The Museum of Modern Art in New York.”

-Donahn.org/articles, Art in Embassies
Photo: KenVan Sickle

“In the forties and fifties, Aikman painted winters in New York City, and summers at Provincetown and later in Maine. … Aikman showed in galleries in New York City including The Artists’ Gallery, Green Mountain Gallery, Blue Mountain Gallery, Pyramid Gallery, and Westbeth Gallery.”

-Biography, www.cicelyaikman.com

“Mr. Andrews was a vivid storyteller, using memories of his childhood in the segregated South to create narrative-based works that addressed human suffering and injustice. Over his lifetime, his social concerns ranged from the civil rights struggle and the antiwar movement to the Holocaust, poverty and the forced relocation of American Indians. … His paintings, prints and collages are in the collections of more than 30 museums, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Art Institute of Chicago.”

–Benjamin Genocchio, New York Times, Nov. 12, 2006

“Jeff’s passion for music began at 12 when he learned electric bass. After graduating from Dulaney High and studying at Peabody Conservatory, Jeff continued studies at Berklee College of Music, and with several private teachers. He influenced the jazz fusion scene in the early 1980’s, playing bass with notable bands including Blood, Sweat & Tears, Special EFX, Michael Brecker Band, Steps Ahead, Wayne Shorter Quintet, Vital Information, Mike Stern Trio, and Jeff Andrews & New Standards Band. Known for his ensemble work, Jeff was a top-choice for such groups.”

–Baltimore Sun, April 7, 2019

“Although his parents had reservations about his becoming an artist, Bill’s métier was visual art. He cultivated his unique style of drawing from the worst mistakes his students made; combined with satirical interpretations, Bill invited viewers to re-experience famous works of art through parody, not only of the subject matter but of fine art techniques. … Bill’s appreciation for classical paintings is revealed in his visual satire using a childlike style enjoyed by many, even if the art it references is not always recognized. His humor gently attacks the pomposity and foibles of society as depicted in traditional art, the contemporary art market—and by famous painters. The functions of satire and irony are to poke fun but also to make people reassess situations.”
—Alison Armstrong, excerpt from obituary, January 2023

“Nothing is reasonable or realistic in the style that Mr. Anthony developed in the 1960s by combining the errors he found in drawings by his students: no necks, wrists or waists; bad noses; stubby fingers and toes; flat faces with feral eyes and high foreheads; and, perhaps strangest of all, knobby breasts years ahead of the rage for implants. … Most important, however, are his cautious, scratchy line and the grubby aura of excessive erasures. The totality dovetailed perfectly with Mr. Anthony’s view of human haplessness, of people as creatures bungling their way, often cruelly, through life. … Touching on all his major subjects, the show suggests in its own quiet way that Mr. Anthony finds few subjects off limits. There are send-ups of famous works of art, illustrations of scenes from Greek drama, news articles played straight and also twisted. (‘Insatiable’ recasts torture victims as masochists who just can’t get enough.) There are drawings from ‘War Is Swell: A Kid’s Idiotic Vision of World War II’ (2000), which show the German general staff looking befuddled and Hitler quaking.”
—Roberta Smith, From review of “William Anthony: Retrospective, 1961- Present,” New York Times, Jan. 11, 2008

“Mr. Ávalos joined ‘The Electric Company’ in its second season, 1972, a time when there were few Hispanic faces on television. He remained with the show until it went off the air in 1977, appearing in more than 600 episodes. … Mr. Ávalos’s other regular television roles include Dr. Thomas Esquivel on the CBS sitcom ‘E/R’ in the 1980s and Principal Rivas on ‘Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper’ in the ’90s. … His film credits included ‘Hot Stuff’ (1979), ‘Stir Crazy’ (1980), ‘Hollywood Homicide’ (2003) and ‘$5 a Day’ (2008). … In 1983, Mr. Ávalos starred in ‘Condo,’ a short-lived ABC sitcom about an upscale white family and its Hispanic neighbors. The series, which also starred McLean Stevenson, was faulted by some critics for trafficking in ethnically based insult comedy. ‘I think that the greatest enemy to the understanding among people of different backgrounds is not the expression of ideas or the occasional trading of insults,’ Mr. Ávalos told the Associated Press in response. ‘The greatest enemy is invisibility.’ ”
-Margalit Fox, New York Times, Jan. 27, 2014
-Photo: Everett Collection

“Through her art, Helène Aylon explored the intersectionality among her feminism, the Orthodox Judaism of her upbringing, and her place in a war-torn world. Married to an Orthodox rabbi at 18 and widowed at 30, Aylon investigated her faith and her feminism through installation art and performance art. … In 1982, as part of an eco–feminist performance piece to rescue the earth, she drove an ‘Earth Ambulance’ across the country, stopping at nuclear bases to ‘rescue’ earth in pillowcases donated by hundreds of women. Her work is in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Jewish Museum, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum.”

–Profiles, Jewish Women’s Archive
Photo: Jewish Women’s Archive

The couple co-wrote novels and nonfiction, notably The First Million Sabras: A Portrait of the Native-Born Israelis (1970). They also produced solo works and works with other authors. In 1972, Russcol, a musician, published an introduction to electronic music titled The Liberation of Sound, which is held in many university libraries.

“His extensive career ranged from international and domestic exhibitions in Peru, Amsterdam and Portugal to Philadelphia, Michigan and New York. His passion for teaching led him to be chosen as an instructor at both the Brooklyn Museum Art School and Parsons Fine Arts. Barber created an extensive body of work that touches on the political, social and humorous aspects of the world we live in.”

-adairlentini.com

“P.J. Barry, a playwright whose drama The Octette Bridge Club played on Broadway, died … in Los Angeles after a brief battle with cancer. … Barry’s credits also included And Fat Freddy’s Blues, staged at the O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut; Heritage, about the women in Abraham Lincoln’s life; and other works at the Hudson Guild Theater in New York, where he served as artistic director.”
-Mike Barnes, Hollywood Reporter, Sept. 10, 2019

“Nadine was an accomplished artist whose vivid paintings and drawings were shown at the Westbeth Gallery in New York City, at the Cherrystone Gallery in Wellfleet, and in many exhibitions at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum … [She is] the subject of Nadine Valenti, Portrait of a Painter, an online documentary by Robert Zaslow that is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.”
– The Provincetown Independent, May 11, 2022
Photo from The Provincetown Independent

“Mr. Benjamin was probably best known as M. L., one of the three ‘corner men,’ street-corner philosophers who gathered daily under a beach umbrella, in Mr. Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing’ (1989). … Although he was a son of small-town South Carolina, he was often cast as urban characters in television dramas, among them ‘Starsky and Hutch,’ ‘Police Story,’ ‘Kojak,’ ‘ER’ and ‘Law & Order.’ … Over the years he appeared in big-budget films alongside stars including Clint Eastwood (‘Escape From Alcatraz,’ 1979), Barbra Streisand (‘Nuts,’ 1987) and Richard Pryor (‘Some Kind of Hero,’ 1982). In 2003 he played a model-train hobbyist in ‘The Station Agent,’ starring Peter Dinklage.”

-Anita Gates, New York Times, July 5, 2019
Photo: Photofest

“Mirel Bercovici, a Westbeth painter who once sat in the Philharmonic orchestra pit during rehearsals to capture the image and spirit of Leonard Bernstein, died Sunday at home two weeks after her 93rd birthday. … In July 2002, she had a one-woman show of her work at the Westbeth Gallery on Bethune St. and at the same time was represented in a group show of women artists at the Pen & Brush Gallery on E. 10th St. … The 2002 Westbeth show covered her life as an artist with about 150 paintings ranging from works she did as a prodigy when she lived with her mother in Paris to paintings executed at age 84.”
–Albert Amateau, the Villager, Dec. 29, 2010
Photo: the villager.com

“I’m not a folk artist in a traditional sense, but I think some of my pieces lend themselves to that appearance. So in some ways it is folk art—or outsider art, which falls into its own category. … I consider the things I choose to do to be more of a humanist kind of art. I’m not strictly feminist, even though I looked to women who did samplers. That intrigued me because they were telling stories about their time and what they did, letting you know about their life. That interested me, and I explored that vein.”
-Susan Lynne Berger, as told to Terry Stoller, “Profiles in Art,” Westbeth.org, February 2022

“Beryl reported prominently from Indonesia during the 1960s political upheaval and massacres there, performed on Broadway and in Paris, created and hosted All Join Hands, America’s first multicultural children’s TV show, interviewed heads of state, reported from international hot spots, worked with civil rights leaders, and accompanied Margaret Mead to Bali in 1977. Her paintings and photography have been exhibited nationally and internationally.”

–Legacy.com, April 24, 2020

“Noted feminist author, playwright, actor, teacher, lecturer, and performer. Bluh’s sharp, insightful nonfiction narrative of the emergence of the European feminist movement, “Woman to Woman” (1974), is a landmark account of the second wave of feminism, and her book is used in classrooms across the world. Her popular comic novel “Banana” (1976) is considered by some the first truly feminist novel ever to be published.”
-Legacy.com, Oct. 7, 2008
Photo: from a Lifetime in Pictures – Bonnie Blue Family Album on Youtube

“ ‘Besides being a wonderful all-around actor, he was the most gifted physical comedian I’ve ever worked with,’ said director Joel Zwick of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame. ‘He could do things with his body that were amazing, and he had a sense of humor that was highly evolved.’ ”

–Quoted in Rohan Preston, Star Tribune, Dec. 15, 2015

“Most of all, I want to remember Anne the artist, the painter of extraordinary ‘inner landscapes’ (as she called them) on canvas, as well as her incredible pencil line drawings that—initially inspired by nature—led her to deeper meaning and introspection.

“This is a quote she made about her life’s work: ‘I fell in love with paint, the purity of the color, the texture, the pleasure of applying the paint to canvas until the final brushstroke.’

“Anne and Jennifer Cooke founded the Flea Market Beautification Committee because Anne couldn’t bear to see how chains tied to the Bethune Street trees by bike owners were destroying the bark and killing the trees. The proceeds from Flea Market sales went to fund the planter boxes on Bethune Street, which I designed and helped build. And that is how I got involved with the small committee of 2 + Al Cooke and Wesley Pollitt, Anne’s husband.

“Her other love besides creating art was with Wesley, her daughter Betsy, her small house in the country and the Flea Market. Along with Jennifer, Anne was kind, calm, and rational, a quietly determined, inspirational leader whom we trusted wholeheartedly. Her example of vision, harmony, and elegant wisdom, I hope can continue in the committee not only in honor and in celebration of her life and work, but most of all in gratitude for how she has touched our lives.”
-Christina Maile, excerpt from email to Beautification Committee, July 2023

Hiram Bullock “was a member of the original band for ‘Late Night with David Letterman.’ … Mr. Bullock played on some blockbuster pop albums, including ‘The Stranger’ by Billy Joel, Steely Dan’s ‘Gaucho’ and the soundtrack to ‘A Star is Born’ by Barbra Streisand. His best-known solo was on the 1987 Sting album ‘Nothing Like the Sun,’ in a version of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Little Wing.’ … But Mr. Bullock was always more than a session ace. He made his biggest impact in the realm of jazz-rock, funk and fusion, and his own albums, which often featured his singing and songwriting, never strayed far from that base. … He had substantial and productive relationships with other jazz musicians, including the composer and arranger Gil Evans, who served as a kind of mentor, and the bassist Jaco Pastorius, who taught him and employed him in multiple bands.”

-Nate Chinen, New York Times, July 31, 2008

Excerpt from review of Westbeth art show, 1971: “The main interest in [Claire] Burch’s show is a suite of drawings incorporating fragments of family snapshots and matched to the pages of a manuscript of poems. Gallant and garrulous, the poems confront the trauma of the artist’s divorce with lines as likeable as these: ‘… my mother rages get out/and look for a new father for your children/my children don’t want a new father, they want pizza.’ The graceful, economical drawings, meanwhile, depict nice‐looking men and women sitting or lying about in a state of sensuous alertness. The intimacy is unforced and infectious.”

–Peter Schjeldahl, New York Times, Sept. 19, 1971

I am ironing the dress in which I ran from the prom/ I am ironing my favorite dresses of long ago/ I am ironing the dresses I did not have/ and the ones that I did have, stitched so finely of fog/ I am ironing the dress of water in which I met you/ I am ironing our tablecloth of sun and our coverlet of moon/ I am ironing the sky/ I am folding the clouds like linen/ I am ironing smoke

I am ironing sad foreheads and deep wrinkles of despair/ I am ironing sackcloth/ I am ironing bandages/ I am ironing huge damp piles of worries/ I am smoothing and patting and folding and hanging over chairs to air out and dry/ I am ironing the tiniest things but for whom or for what I cannot imagine/ I am ironing my shadow which is ironing me.

–“Woman Ironing” by Olga Cabral

“Joseph Cady taught Literature and Medicine in the Division of Medical Humanities at the University of Rochester Medical School. Among his publications are seven essays in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, including the essay ‘AIDS Literature.’ ”
—muse.jhu.edu/article/20150
Photo: Courtesy David Alexander

“Camins, who was born in Russia, had studied in Paris and at the Art Students League of New York — that crucible from which so many Provincetown artists emerged. An amateur documentary filmmaker, he produced a 16-millimeter movie in 1962 about Provincetown artists, including Hans Hofmann, Karl Knaths and Franz Kline.”

-buildingprovincetown.wordpress.com

From a 2010 article in the Architect’s Newspaper: “Candido’s current exhibition, The Great White Whale Is Black at Cooper Union in New York … offers a rich body of work spanning five decades of an extraordinary career. Included in the show … are Candido’s visionary cable cities. Executed in a manner that implies a quick thought—yet reflecting years of study and experience—the style recalls that of the New York school in its rapid execution, simultaneously implying a kind of personal handwriting, aerial plan, and rendering in an abstract yet universal language. Consistent with these works are the large-scale brush stroke paintings: linear, calligraphic ramblings across tall vertical panels that progressively fill the surface with near-absolute darkness. …
“Despite the enormous production of drawings and paintings, Candido has also had an important career as a designer. He made the first design for the longitudinal elevation of Konrad Wachsmann’s Air Force hangar, developed in the early 1950s, and was an architectural designer for I.M. Pei from 1954 to 1957. Noteworthy from that period was his design for a single-support, 180-foot diameter steel-and-glass structure at Roosevelt Field on Long Island. He also made a major contribution to the design of the U.S. Pavilion for Expo ’70 by Davis and Brody Architects.”
-Nancy Goldring, “The Calligraphic City,” March 2, 2010.
Photo: Seiji Kakizaki

“Madelyn Cates, 68, Broadway and television actress perhaps best remembered as the concierge in Mel Brooks’ film “The Producers.” The New York native studied at Queens College, the Waldorf School, New York Law School and with Paula Strasberg at the Actors Studio. She made her stage debut as Adelaide in “Guys and Dolls” in Winter Park, Fla., in 1956 and her Broadway debut a decade later as the patient in “Marat/Sade.” Other Broadway and off-Broadway plays included “A Patriot for Me,” “The Kitchen” and “Snowangel.” In Los Angeles, she appeared in “Follies,” “Lenny,” “Side by Side by Sondheim” and other performances at the Colony Studio Theater and in productions at the Studio Theatre Playhouse, Theatre West and Theatre Exchange. She was seen on television in the series “Hill Street Blues,” “St. Elsewhere,” “Cagney & Lacey” and “thirtysomething.”

-Los Angeles Times, July 22, 1993

“Shami began her off-Broadway career in ’63 when her beloved brother Joseph Chaikin formed the Open Theater, directing her in many legendary productions. She toured in Viet Rock, won an Obie for Mutation Show … and the TNC Villager Award for Jean-Claude van Itallie’s Bag Lady (’79). She wrote Selma, which premiered in ’81, then performed in Arthur Miller’s The Last Yankee (’98). Struck by a New York City sanitation truck in ’09, she made a remarkable recovery and performed annually at Westbeth in Stories Around the Table through 2019.”
-New York Times, April 3, 2020

“I was in Rockport, teaching the Steadicam Workshop with Dan Kneece and Travis Clark. Ted came by one evening. He brought a bit of videotape and showed it, sufficiently wowing us all with the clarity of movement, decisive framing and fluid operating. … He was his usual biting self, humorous and fast. One person asked him what he felt was his best asset. I figured oh god, this is a fat pitch he’s been thrown. He stopped with the wiseass stuff and got very sober for a moment, and thought. Then he said, ‘I am not the best Steadicam Operator in the world- ( At the time, debatable….. )- but I can tell you this much: I’m the fastest. Nobody waits on me. I get in there, I do my homework, I prep and am ready, I shoot the scenes and I get out. Quick and painless.’ ”

Peter Abraham, “Ted Churchill Remembered,” SteadicamForum.com, June 16, 2004

“Carol Cole, who went by the nickname Cookie, appeared on her father’s ‘The Nat King Cole Show’ on television in the 1950s and went on to appear on TV and in movies in the 1960s and ’70s. Her credits include ‘Sanford and Son’ and the 1974 movie ‘The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.'”
-Legacy.com
-Photo: Wikipedia

“She was an artist, writer, politician, crossword puzzle creator and pond developer. She has often been called the mother of the Stratton Mountain resort since she was one of its early developers.”

-www.jdcole.com/a-bit-of-history

From an article in the Bennington Banner, Aug. 1, 1970, on the occasion of a show of Cole’s stained glass: “This past winter, Mrs. Cole’s glass and a one-act play she wrote were presented at the inaugural exhibition of Westbeth Artists in New York City, where Mrs. Cole maintains a workshop.”

“It was the seduction of Abstract Expressionism during his teenage years that ultimately lured Conley to New York. There, the struggle to paint and survive in the City introduced him to work as a graphic designer [including art director at TIME magazine] and … into the age of computer-driven art, design, and photography— all of which he transformed into resources for his own use. Conley’s … paintings strongly manifest influences of contemporary culture in the form of film, video and digital imagery. … The works are complex, multi-layered acrylic paintings that are created by a unique stencil and industrial spray method that he first refined years ago.”

-steveconleyart.com/bio.asp

Jennifer was kind, thoughtful, generous. She was also practical, peaceful, but no nonsense and filled with ideas on how to resolve a situation. This was how so many decades ago, the Westbeth Beautification Committee was founded. Jennifer and cofounder Anne Brody were shocked when they saw bicycles tied to the trees on Bethune Street, their chains rubbing the bark raw. I suggested building planter boxes to protect them. Jennifer and Anne immediately had the idea of creating the now legendary Westbeth Flea Market to fund not only the boxes but also to reimburse tenants who planted flowers. Over the years, funding expanded to include Westbeth projects, local charities, and disaster relief. From Jennifer and Anne’s simple concern for trees, people all over the world have been helped.
—Christina Maile, Excerpt from correspondence, April 25, 2022

“Mr. Cowell’s playing epitomized the piano’s ability to consolidate generations of musical history into a unified expression, while extending various routes into the future. And when he needed to say more than the piano allowed, he expanded his palette. … He was among the first jazz musicians to make prominent use of the kalimba, a thumb piano from southeastern Africa. In his later decades he worked often with a digital sound-design program, Kyma, which allowed him to alter the pitch and texture of an acoustic piano’s sound. … In 1971, together with the trumpeter Charles Tolliver, Mr. Cowell founded Strata-East Records, a pioneering institution in jazz and the broader Black Arts Movement. It would release a steady run of pathbreaking music over the next decade, becoming one of the most successful Black-run labels of its time.”

-Giovanni Russonello, New York Times, Dec. 28, 2020
Photo: Maxim Francois / Vision Fugitive

“Early into less expensive new media, Creston also pioneered another low-cost contemporary form. In 1969, as he recalls: ‘I made a piece called Construction Site, which was meant to blend so well into the real world as to become a part of it, and not be noticed as anything special, obtrusive as it might be. I bought lumber, traffic-marking yellow paint, special blinking lights, and other materials. I built a fake construction site, including an obviously fake hole, installing it on 6th Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Streets, in front of a vacant store. It was up for weeks, and several times protected by the police, who supplemented my materials with barricades.’ … Reflecting 1960s ideals of meshing art with life and of making art available to a public larger than well-heeled collectors, Construction Site also echoed Creston’s films in a fascination with New York City street life.”

-Richard Kostelanetz, “Bill Creston,” A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, Second Edition
Photo: Barbara Rosenthal

“As a painter, Mr. Cutrone was a representative of the school often called post-Pop. In his best-known pieces, he painted cartoon characters like Woody Woodpecker and Donald Duck onto American flags and those of other nations. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and elsewhere. … Mr. Cutrone was equally renowned as someone who had known almost everyone, and tried almost everything, in the New York art world of the 1960s and after, bridging the sea change from Pop to punk.”

-Margalit Fox, New York Times, June 26, 2013
Photo: Stephen Shore

“Carmen Czernik was born in Spain and received her musical training in the U.S. She attended the Mannes College of Music … and then earned her master’s degree from the Juilliard School of Music, where she was a scholarship student of Beveridge Webster. … Upon graduation, she was awarded a Fulbright grant for two years to Italy. … Miss Czernik has performed extensively in this country and has toured South & Central America, the Caribbean and the Middle East.”

-Publicity folder

“Magda was a screenwriter and editor. She was born in Manhattan in 1959, and spent most of her life there, except for five years in Beirut as a child. She spent many summers in the dunes on Lake Michigan. Magda left a list of her likes and pet peeves for her obit. Likes: disco music, dogs, stick bugs. Dislikes: shawls, bad drivers and being poked.”
-Legacy.com, New York Times, June 25, 2023

“He was a roadie in the late ’80s touring with Bad Brains. He created, produced, and deejayed over 500 shows for FortyDeuceRadio.com. He received a gold record as producer of 3rd Bass’s hit single ‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’ He wrote and produced the web series ‘We Deliver’ with Seth Zvi Rosenfeld, and co-wrote, with Adam Yauch, a film script about graphic artists in the ’70s.”
—New York Times, Dec. 29, 2019

“For those of us who grew up with Geeby Dajani, he was bigger than life. His magic can’t be written about or described. It was in his being, in his presence. … I spent my childhood and, honestly, probably all of my life, under Geeby’s spell. … As a kid, Geeby was wild, funny, brash, sharp, joyous, unruly, playful, scary, curious, defiant, and very present.”

—Michel Dobbs, Westbeth Chronicles, Westbeth.org
Photo: Geeby at CBGB with Frontiline, from collection of Noah Evans

“Giglio Dante came to Boston from Rome in 1921. … Considered a teenage prodigy, Dante started painting portraits and murals at a young age. In the mid-1930s when working for the WPA , he was commissioned to paint two murals, depicting working Italian immigrants at the Michelangelo School located on Charter Street in Boston. … He was also part of the dramatic Abstract Expressionist movement in New York during the mid-1940s and 50s. … Dante showed his work in Boston and New York City during the 1940s and moved permanently to New York in the 1950s. He became part of the Betty Parsons Gallery for 10 years. … He was one of the first artists to move into the Westbeth Artists Community in 1970 where he exhibited in their major shows.”
-Wikipedia
Photo: Night Face painting by Giglio Dante (courtesy of ArtNet)

“At a time when Abstract Expressionism placed a premium on psychological intensity and spontaneous mark-making, [Nassos Daphnis] coolly arranged color in precise, controlled patterns on the canvas. In his color-plane theory, black commanded a forward position, with blue, red and yellow progressively receding toward white, which represented infinity. … ‘The important thing for me was to place the color in its proper plane, which I feel is the only way that a color can exist,’ he said in an oral history interview for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art in 1964.”

-William Grimes, New York Times, Dec. 12, 2010
Photo: Arthur Mones 1980, courtesy of Richard Tattinger Gallery

“George Deem, a painter who admired master painters so much that he spent his own career re-painting their works, albeit with clever alterations … If imitation is a sincere form of flattery, Mr. Deem’s admiration of his artistic forebears was carried out on his own canvases. Gifted at reproduction, he concentrated on making explicit references to other painters and other paintings, uncannily recreating the style, the light, the brushstrokes as well as the details of artists he loved. … He wanted the viewer to experience not only the painting in front of him but also the referenced works that came before. The critic Charles Molesworth called the technique ‘temporal collage.’ ”

-Bruce Weber, “George Deem, 75, Artist Inspired by Master Painters, Is Dead,” New York Times, Aug. 20, 2008

“Ms. de Groot was born in a suburb of London and studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and appeared in British productions beside John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Tyrone Guthrie. … Her first performance in the United States was in ‘Lovers and Friends,’ with Katherine Cornell and Raymond Massey. Later, she appeared on Broadway in Bernard Shaw’s ‘Apple Cart,’ with Maurice Evans; Sean O’Casey’s ‘Red Roses for Me,’ with Kevin McCarthy, and ‘Point of No Return,’ with Henry Fonda. … She also appeared on television in several dramas by Paddy Chayefsky, including ‘The Mother’ and ‘The Catered Affair.’ … After being selected by Moss Hart for the role of Mrs. Pearce, the housekeeper, in ‘My Fair Lady,’ she toured with the National Company in the United States and the Soviet Union from 1956 to 1962.”

-William H. Honan, New York Times, April 1, 1993

“The late Roy Andries de Groot spent most of his life seeking perfection. And he spent the last 20-odd years of his life seeking the perfect meal. De Groot’s passion was so strong he traveled from country to country and table to table in pursuit of his quest. … Fortunately for many, De Groot detailed his pursuit with the written word. While he only may have encountered perfection in brief spurts, his journey resulted in some of the best food writing ever. And for some, such as Andre Soltner, chef/owner of Lutece in New York City, De Groot’s pursuit inspired perfection.”

-JeanMarie Brownson, Chicago Tribune, March 5, 1987
Photo: Toronto Star Library

“With the appearance in 1976 of Final Alice, David Del Tredici’s hour-long setting of Lewis Carroll for high soprano and large orchestra, a new movement in music, Neo-Romanticism, was born. Not only did Del Tredici forge for himself a fresh compositional path, but at the same time gave hope to a generation of young composers seeking a new way of composing … ‘Del Tredici,’ said Aaron Copland, ‘is that rare find among composers–a creator with a truly original gift. I venture to say that his music is certain to make a lasting impression on the American musical scene. I know of no other composer of his generation who composes music of greater freshness and daring, or with more personality.’ ”
-Biography, daviddeltredici.com
Photo: Susan Johann

“The writer Neil Derrick was raised in California. Under the pen name Bruce Elliot, he published ‘The Potency Clinic’ and other novels. In 1970, Derrick had a brain tumor removed and lost much of his sight. With his partner Edward Field, he wrote the novel ‘The Villagers’ in 1980 [revised 2000].”

–Dylan Foley, The Last Bohemians, Aug. 30, 2011

Photo: Copyright Days of Love

Jan Doubrava had been associate director of the art department at the New School for Social Research since 1958. “Mr. Doubrava, a Czechoslovak, came to this country at the age of 12. He was also an artist in his own right.”

-New York Times, Aug. 4, 1972

“One day I was in the studio, and I had the canvas, and I was thinking what I was going to do with it. I had already done the basic priming, and I thought I’d start experimenting with something else entirely. I took a photograph of my parents on their wedding day, and I started painting that, copying it in a sense. It wasn’t a copy. I wasn’t a realist. It was a photograph taken in 1929, so it wasn’t sharp. It had an interesting light-and-shadow kind of quality, which those old photographs have. … I set the painting at night (it had been photographed during the day); I put an automobile in there and had light coming out of the house onto the porch—none of this was in the photograph. But I began to combine other elements with the two figures standing. … It was … working with light and shadow, composition. I think what caught me, once I finished that painting, was that there were two people in it—there was an intensity to my painting at that point, I realized. That painting eventually was picked by Ivan Karp, who was at the Leo Castelli Gallery, to go on an American Federation of Arts tour, and it was the cover of the catalog.”

-Jack Dowling, 2013, Profiles in Art, Westbeth.org

“Dragonette was called a ‘metaphysical poet’ and a ‘jazz poet’ … She was involved in a number of performances with dancers and musicians. In 1962, she performed her poetry with the Eric Dolphy Quintet at Town Hall. Active in the poetry scene in New York City, Dragonette, along with poet Howard Ant, is said to have started poetry readings at the 10th Street Coffee House in the early 1960s. … Her published work includes Parable of the Fixed Stars (Allograph Books, 1968) and Remember Zion (Mercedes Books, 1970).”

–Boldface, Westbeth.org

From a review of the exhibit Art Paradise: Fifty Years of Painting: “Mr. Drexler … has followed his own slightly eccentric path for more than five decades, but his paintings of generalized female nudes (based on his wife, the Pop painter and writer Rosalyn Drexler), horses or deer in the midst of broad, flat areas of paint combine the primordial and the abstract in a way that is close to the center of a Modernist mainstream running from Matisse to Susan Rothenberg. The large canvases featured in this small retrospective show have a scruffy, raw appearance; they are not beautiful but they exude a persuasive urgency of purpose.”

-Ken Johnson, New York Times, Feb. 4, 2005
Photo: lastbohemians.blogspot.com

“[Helen] authored many books of poetry … and novels, including A Thousand Wives Dancing. … Her novel [The] Dream of Rewards was nominated for the Pushcart Press 10th Annual Editors’ Choice Award. Her fiction, poetry, reviews and articles have appeared in many journals. … Helen was a member and playwright-in-residence at the Circle Repertory Theater in NYC in its early years. Her play Time Shadows was produced in 1969 … Helen was one of the founding members of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective, and had many plays produced Off-Off Broadway at the Theatre for the New City in the ’70s and ’80s. Her plays have been performed by many experimental theater companies throughout the United States, Europe, and South America.”

-Jackie Lipton
Photo: Jackie Lipton

“Ralph Dubin [was] an artist whose work evolved from social realist figuration into one more heavily influenced by abstract forms. … Mr. Dubin’s early work was influenced by Ben Shahn, whom he met while attending the Brooklyn Museum Art School. He was represented by the Kraushaar Galleries in New York from 1952 to 1975.”
–New York Times, March 16, 1988

George Dworzan lived at Westbeth in the 1970s. A New York Times legacy from Jan. 10, 1999, paid tribute to him as an “artist, World War II Army Air Force veteran, educator, musician and beloved friend.”

“Hélène Dworzan was born in Paris. … [She] moved to the United States in 1950. … While working as a translator and teacher, Hélène Dworzan was an active member of the New York literary scene, serving as associate editor of the Chelsea Literary Review from 1970 to 1981, founding the Continuum series of poetry and fiction readings in 1970; she continued to direct that program until 1976. In addition to her critically acclaimed novel, Le Temps de la Chrysalide, she has written short stories and poems that have appeared in various publications. … In 1961, she received a grant from Material Jewish Claims against Germany in support of a fictional narrative based on her experiences as a survivor of the Holocaust.” [Editor’s note: Dworzan was an original member of the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective.]

–Amazon.com, The Time of the Chrysalis, About the Author, 2011
Photo: Tom Monaster, Daily News 1971

“Ron Faber had a long, illustrious and award-winning career in the theatre, television and movies. For some years, in the mid-to-late sixties, he was an incredibly intense and magnetic actor in Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater. In 1967, Chaikin’s workshop created its most famous production, The Serpent. For a 1969 European tour, featuring the group’s new collaborative creation Terminal, Peter Feldman directed a wild, loud, filthy, and very funny production of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Cocu, featuring Faber in the title role. Ron’s performance as Pa Ubu shocked and offended Cartesian sensibilities in Paris and Bordeaux, just as it later offended Catholic audiences at Nazareth College during the Open’s New York State tour. (Faber was delighted.)”

-Peter Maloney, April 12, 2023, by email. Maloney worked with Ron Faber in the Open Theater for four years and appeared with him in Arrabal’s And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers (1972).

“Ron was highly intelligent, very kind and had a marvelous sense of humor. He was a loyal friend. He was very helpful to me when I acted with him in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days at the Cherry Lane Theatre [directed by Joseph Chaikin in 2002]. Ron sat behind me and was very encouraging, whispering to me in a quiet, secret way. It was a memorable performance that we worked on together.”

-Joyce Aaron, April 11, 2023, by phone. Aaron had also worked with Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater.

“Drawing largely on Oriental and prehistoric precedents, Mr. Farr evolved an art that combined the freedom of the first generation of the New York School with timeless archaic art. … Paul Rosenberg & Co. exhibited his bronzes of horses in four showings between 1957 and 1972. Previously, he had exhibited at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery and had executed murals for the Social Security Building in Washington and other public buildings.”

–New York Times, June 18, 1973
Photo: invaluable.com

“When Louis Faurer encountered memorable silhouettes and faces on New York’s sidewalks, he highlighted the liveliness and sorrow of metropolitan life. He rarely looked up at the skyline: New York’s essence was on its teeming streets, especially in Times Square, which he prowled at night,” wrote Sarah Moroz in the New York Times. Moroz ends the article with a quote from Agnès Sire, director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson: ” ‘The general public didn’t know Louis Faurer, but all the specialized people with a thorough understanding of the medium were touched by his work … They saw in him a great originality — his deep empathy, his mastery of composition. It’s photography without flashiness; that is to say, it is not hyperbolic. It’s sensitive and honest. People recognized that in him, but it’s not necessarily easy to see.’ ”
–Sarah Moroz, New York Times, Sep. 27, 2016

“Mel Fowler studied art at the California Art Institute as well as abroad in Mexico and Europe. He had numerous one-man shows, illustrated books for major New York publishers and is listed … in Who’s Who in American Art.”

-worthpoint.com
Photo: Richard Quarrells

The following is from Michael J. Ellenbogen, curator/director: “I began my career of collecting art after I met Theodore Fried and, through Fried, André Kertész, in the 1970s. Both artists, Hungarian émigrés, worked in Paris before the war and were reunited after settling in New York City, Kertész in the late 1930s and Fried barely escaping with his life after fleeing to Toulouse just before the Nazi invasion in 1940. The Quakers helped him gain transport to New York from Toulouse, in 1942. I was a magazine editor and writer when, in 1972, we met at an art show. When Fried died in 1980, I was among the inheritors of his estate. Several years later, with the passing of Kertész, I was able to stage a show about both men called ‘Fried and Kertész: An Enduring Friendship’ at a Madison Avenue gallery.”
—mjellenbogen.com
Photo: André Kertész

“Yoshishige Furukawa moved to America in the 1960s, and split the last decades of his life between the United States and his native Japan. The impact of these decisions is reflected in his multifaceted work from the 1970s, which indicate an eye to Minimalism as well as a deep sensitivity to material and line that recalls Japanese Imperial architecture. … His work is in numerous important Japanese Museum collections, including the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo; the National Museum of Art in Osaka; the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto … [and was] exhibited in the U.S. and Japan throughout his life.”

-roberthenrycontemporary.com
Photo: Artist’s estate and Beta Pictoris Gallery/Maus Contemporary

From an interview with Geeby Dajani (ME 62): “I started producing hip-hop with John Gamble and Dante Ross. We had a production group called SD50’s (Stimulated Dummies), and we produced Brand Nubian, 3rd Bass, Kurious. This was all from 1990 to 1994. We did a lot of what people call the ‘Golden Era of Hip-Hop.’ Our production studio was in the same studio that Frontline practiced, the 50 Studio in the basement of Westbeth. It was a hardcore and hip-hop room: live room for bands and production studio for hip-hop.”
—Freddy Alva, Urban Styles: Graffiti in New York Hardcore, 2017

“It had started quite innocently the day before. Westbeth’s own John Gamble had let me in on a little secret; he had somehow snagged a job at school — shoveling coal into the building’s furnace for a dollar a day. Was I interested in making a dollar too? You bet! There were only two rules: we had to show up before school started— and we could not tell a soul. We stoked the furnace for the better part of an hour, collecting our dollars, and then heading up to class happy as clams. … Apparently, we had attracted a good deal of attention covered, as we were, in coal dust. Sadly, that was to be my one and only day shoveling coal, and it was the last we ever saw of that janitor.”
—Sebastian Holst, “The Open Classroom [1972],”
Westbeth Chronicles

Photo: @msanner1

“Vito Giacalone was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1930, and … practiced for a lifetime as an abstract artist in New York City. He [was] a long-standing, exhibiting member of the American Abstract Artists. Giacalone … taught color theory at the School for Visual Arts in New York.”

–Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State

“Mr. Goddard fell in love with Renaissance art at Princeton University (BA 1956) and did postgraduate work at Columbia University and the Institute of Fine Arts. In 1969, he cofounded the Editorial Photocolor Archives, which supplied images to publishers, and from 1974 to 1978, he was managing editor of ARTnews. … As an art writer—a term he preferred to art historian or art critic, though he was all three—he had a curatorial eye, impeccable taste, wide-ranging knowledge, and a penetrating intellect. His art books include ‘Tschacbasov: A Collection of His Work’ (1964), ‘Harry Jackson’ (with Larry Pointer, 1981), and the comprehensive history ‘American Painting’ (1990). Ever mindful of the power of the image, he grounded his texts in the act of looking closely at an artwork and teaching others to look with the same open mind and focused attention.”
-New York Times, Oct. 11-17, 2021

“Kenneth Sean Golden uses layered and partially masked photographic images to explore masculinity and sexuality. The politics of representation are of the utmost importance to the artist and with the growth of technologies, the computer is an important tool. As a gay man, the artist is engaged in creating work that addresses today’s sensibility. … [He] has exhibited internationally and locally for the past 40 years. Solo exhibitions include: Westbeth Gallery (New York), Vessel (New York), and Familia y Amigos (Barcelona, Spain). Group exhibitions include: Detroit Museum of New Art, Westbeth Gallery, Pulse Art, Leo Castelli – Bailey House Benefit & Auction, APEX Art, and University of Illinois Gallery 400. His work is in the Collection of Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale.”

-carterburdengallery.org/kenneth-sean-golden, 2016

Grant Gordon appeared in film, on TV and on Broadway, including the 1931 Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra.

“The author or editor of more than 30 books, Ms. Gourse devoted most of her writing to profiles of jazz virtuosos, starting in 1984 with ‘Louis’ Children: American Jazz Singers,’ a collection of biographical sketches. … Her most notable full-length biographies included ‘Unforgettable: The Life and Mystique of Nat King Cole’ (1991), ‘Sassy: The Life of Sarah Vaughan’ (1993) and ‘Skain’s Domain: A Biography’ (1999), which she wrote with the participation of its subject, Wynton Marsalis. She later chronicled the lives of Art Blakey (2001) and Carmen McRae (2002). … The magazine Jazz Times named her biography ‘Straight, No Chaser: The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk’ (1997), one of the top jazz books of the year.”

-New York Times, Jan. 5, 2005
Photo: Raymond Ross

“Lee Guilliatt passed away peacefully in her home on Oct. 7, 2021, her wife and partner of 49 years, Essie Borden, by her side. Lee was one of the earliest residents of Westbeth and painted in her studio before moving to a loft she owned in SoHo in 1976, where she held yearly, successful exhibitions. Lee was a leading actor in many of Al Carmines’ musicals at Judson Poets’ Theater, working both off-off Broadway and off Broadway, where she starred in Joan and The Faggot.”

-Terence Burk, Oct. 12, 2021
Photo: https://www.therestimakeup.com/participants

“Mr. Haberstroh headed the Haberstroh Film Studio, Inc., 9 West 19th Street. In the nineteen‐fifties, he was a pioneer in making low‐budget space films with the Captain Video television series. As a result, he became a special‐effects expert for numerous TV commercials. … In 1962, excerpts of his ‘First Men Into Space’ simulated, for many TV viewers, the earth‐orbiting space voyage of John Glenn, the astronaut. Among Mr. Haberstroh’s other films were ‘Trip to the Planets’ and ‘Space Probes,’ produced in cooperation with Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Inc., and a five‐film astronomy series, produced in cooperation with McGraw‐Hill Films.”

-New York Times, Dec. 8, 1973

“After graduating from Rutgers University, Patricia moved to Manhattan in 1957 to study drawing and painting at Cooper Union and City College. She was an original resident of Westbeth, along with her husband John Hacker and their son, Christopher Hacker, where they made a life and found community. In her paintings, Patricia strove to evoke bounty and impulse, qualities inherent to her process, textures often arising from found objects, with vibrant colors in lively juxtaposition. Her work has been exhibited in New York City and abroad.”

-Christopher Hacker, April 2021

“Peter taught painting, drawing, and art history for 35 years at [Kingsborough Community College], Pratt Institute, and Marist College. … Peter was known for his abstract expressionist paintings, satirical drawings, and digital photography. His work has been exhibited widely.”

-KCC Retirees Newsletter, Vol. 5, Issue 1, Spring 2011

“Mr. Hassell’s music floated outside the genre boundaries of classical music, electronica, ambient music or jazz. He described Fourth World as ‘a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques.’ … On the 20 albums he made as a leader, his trumpet usually had an eerily disembodied sound, one that was processed through electronics and enfolded in shadowy reverberations, sometimes using harmonizers to multiply each note in parallel lines. … He conceived his two final albums, ‘Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One),’ in 2018, and ‘Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two),’ in 2020, as ‘pentimento.’ … Mr. Hassell described his approach to the music as ‘seeing it in terms of a painting with layers and touch-ups and start-overs, with new layers that get erased in places that let the underlying pattern come to the top and be seen (or heard).’ ”

-Jon Pareles, New York Times, June 28, 2021

“He was an American Modernist painter that used elements from the Cubist and Surrealist movements and is well known for his New Yorker magazine covers. … Haupt moved to Manhattan in 1927, supporting his studio art through graphic design assignments for the New Yorker, Charm, and Vanity Fair for five years. His debut cover for the New Yorker was produced almost immediately and he created forty-five covers for the magazine during his stay in New York. … In the 1930s, his paintings were displayed in several New York art galleries, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Whitney Museum … [Later], he worked his way through abstract, color-drenched, non-representational painting styles and created a series of Surrealist-inspired paintings.”

-Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Alumni Profile
Photo: New Yorker cover, February 28, 1931

“Carol Hebald’s The Heart Too Long Suppressed [2001] is a most compelling journey through mental crises. Haunting and powerful in its sweep of pain and fear, here finally is a life-affirming memoir from the pen of a born artist. I couldn’t put in down.”
-Uta Hagen, quoted on carolhebald.com
Photo: regalhousepublishing.com/2018/03/12/two-writers-in-new-york

Ruth Herschberger is the author of Adam’s Rib (1948), a seminal book of feminist essays. Her poems have been published in journals and anthologies, and collected in A Way of Happening (1948) and Nature & Love Poems (1969). The following is an excerpt of her poem “The Huron,” which was included in the book Westbeth Poets: An Anthology of Poets (1971).

“I swam the Huron of love, and am not ashamed,
It was many saw me do it, scoffing, scoffing,
They said it was foolish, winter and all,
But I dove in, greaselike, and swam,
And came up where Erie verges.”

-photo Sergei Gerard

“Evelyn Hofer was born in Marburg, Germany, in 1922 and died in 2009 in Mexico City. In the years in between, Hofer created a body of work that both looked back to the tradition of August Sander and anticipated the color work of William Eggleston, causing her to be called ‘the most famous unknown photographer in America’ by New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer – a devout supporter of her work.
–danzigergallery.com
Photo: Andreas Pauly

“A forty-year veteran of New York book and magazine publishing, Patricia Horan was the founding editor of a longstanding Crown/Random House division—Random House Value Publishing. There she developed, revised and reissued books and series, creating many perennial bestsellers. Among them are Gray’s Anatomy, the Blooper humor series, the Avenel classics and the Arthur Rackham series of distinguished children’s books. … As a playwright, [she] has written or contributed to nine successful New York City evenings of theater and song. She was a founding member of the pioneering and widely reviewed Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective. … She was co-author and lyricist for a documentary musical, What Time of Night It Is, commissioned by the National Organization for Women. The musical was given several productions in New York and Washington, D.C., and was recorded by Pacifica Radio.”

-patriciahoran.com

“Robert Carl of Fanfare Magazine called her one of the major composers of her generation because of her ‘exquisitely refined musical personality, overflowing imagination and constantly inventive craft.’ That inventiveness was seemingly inexhaustible: her music is coloristic and textural, with minimal melodic elements. It anticipated immersive ambient drone, trance, and spectral music long before they became fashionable. Her music’s intimate connection with the human body was expressed in her extensive work with dance legends like Nancy Meehan and Mikhail Baryshnikov, who choreographed her string quartet, Lemniscates, for his White Oak Dance Project.”

-The Eleanor Hovda Collection|Innova Recordings, One Sheet

“Mr. Ignatow was the author and editor of 27 books, including ‘I Have a Name’ (1996) and ‘Shadowing the Ground’ (1991). He published short stories and a memoir, ‘The One in the Many’ (1988), and edited collections of the work of William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman. The critic Ralph J. Mills once wrote that Mr. Ignatow followed ‘in the tradition of those genuine poets who have, in independent ways, struggled to create a living American poetry from the immediacies of existence in this country, from the tragedies and potentialities of its legacy, and from the abundant music and vitality of its language.”’
–Dinitia Smith, New York Times, Nov. 19, 1997

“Mr. Jensen … was an associate editor of Architectural Record magazine from 1968 to 1973. He was a co-author with Patricia Conway of ”Ornamentalism: The New Decorativeness in Architecture and Design” … He organized several exhibitions, including a [1979-80] retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts on the history of the South Bronx. Titled ”Devastation/Resurrection,” the exhibition dealt with the causes of the area’s deterioration and possibilities for its rehabilitation. In 1988 Mr. Jensen mounted an exhibition, ”Architectural Art: Affirming the Design Relationship,” at the American Craft Museum.”

-New York Times, July 12, 1990

“Joseph was the co-founder of the 1960’s Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in NY—an artists group involved in creating socially conscious artworks. ‘My art is a confrontation. Among the many realities of art expression, this remains the most constant purpose of my aesthetic. It is, of course, a social art, based on my “gut” perceptions of our worldly conditions; but it draws upon each viewer to confront himself in consideration of his role in affecting those conditions.’ ”

-“Cliff Joseph: Artist and Activist,” Works, aarongalleries.com

“Kates was no stranger to the small-screen or big movie sets, beginning her career in the 1980s and 1990s, appearing in episodes of Matlock, Thunder Alley, and Seinfeld. In her later years, she starred in episodes of Caroline in the City, Lizzie McGuire, Judging Amy, and Rescue Me, and had roles in the films Lola Versus and The Nurse and Asylum. … She also had a successful on-and-off Broadway career and was the founding member of the Colony Theatre in Los Angeles.”
—Mollie Mitchell, “The Top 5 Kathryn Kates Film and TV Roles from ‘Orange Is the New Black’ to ‘Seinfeld,’ ”
www.newsweek.com, Jan. 26, 2022

From a review of Allen Katzman’s book The Immaculate: “Mr. Katzman’s short sojourn with Apache Indians in Oklahoma inspired two of the five sections of this book of brief poems, but he is at his best in his East Village city sparrow performances. If there are some inconsequentials such as: ‘My own mind is very hard to me. It’s as if/ it were carrying ME around!’ there are also fortunate flashes: ‘From a doorway a/ woman stumbles past me and blunders into/ old age.’ Katzman bobs through some punchy perceptions dealing with love, gut humanity and cybernetic apocalypses (‘AMERICA HATES HER CRAZIES!’). He is the founder and editor of the East Village Other, and it’s a kind of hurried mimeo poetry most of the time–but scrappy and fresh.”
-kirkusreviews.com, June 1, 1970

“In the 1950’s Mr. Katzman was featured in group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Biennale. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney, the Modern, the Art Institute of Chicago and elsewhere. … Mr. Katzman was a slatherer, using a palette knife to lay down paint so thick ‘its troughs and crests seem almost like a frozen sea,’ the New York Times said in 1951. Writing in the Times in 1964, Stuart Preston described Mr. Katzman’s figure and landscape paintings as ‘deviously expressionist in character, by an artist whose style might be described as restrained Soutine.’ ”

-Margalit Fox, New York Times, Nov. 1, 2004

“Mr. Kawabata moved to New York in the late 1950’s after he received an enthusiastic visit in Japan from the dealer Betty Parsons. In this country, he showed for many years at her gallery in the company of several great Abstract Expressionist painters – Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and others – with whose work his own has a great affinity.”

–Douglas C. McGill, New York Times, March 4, 1988
Photo: Tom Haar

“James Kelly had a career which spanned nearly seven decades, including paintings and graphic works. While his work in his native Philadelphia had more of a geometric quality, inspired by Piet Mondrian, his move to California in 1950 changed his style to more gestural, using thick impasto oil paint and swirling motifs common of the San Francisco scene. [Kelly and his wife Sonia Gechtoff moved to New York City in 1958.] … Kelly’s work is part of many permanent collections including the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, the Harvard University Art Museum, the Pasadena Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.”

-Anita Shapolsky Gallery, Sept. 14, 2017
Photo: David Richard Gallery

“Post-sōsaku hanga (creative print movement) artist and master of serigraph technique, Risaburo Kimura ha[d] [a] special affinity for big cities, being born close to Tokyo and later living in New York. In the late 1960s, he started his most important series of prints, ‘City’ series, with well over 400 different renderings of a big city. All of the cities he represented in this series are fictional, and are reduced to masterly use of several colors and minimization of architectural elements.”
—”Risaburo Kimura: Cityscapes,” morikami.org/archives/

At Albright College, Koursaros introduced his students to the work of such experimental filmmakers as Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, and Gregory Markopoulos. A former student, filmmaker Jerry Tartaglia, said in an interview: “My teacher and mentor, Harry Koursaros, was a painter of the Abstract Expressionist School and a friend of Gregory Markopoulos. He regularly brought Underground Films to the College. … Harry purchased a 16mm camera and editing setup ostensibly for the Art Department which he ran, but in practice, it was for me to begin to hone my production skills.”

-Rinaldo Censi, Interview with Jerry Tartaglia, www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/62-archive/lfu-29/616

“Gerald Krefetz, a financial consultant and the author of ‘The Smart Investor’s Guide’ and other books, has written a concise but comprehensive handbook to the enormous quantity of information that appears daily in the financial and business sections of major newspapers. … A monkey throwing darts, it has been said, can choose investments as well as any professional. Maybe so, but I’d just as soon entrust my investments to a monkey who has digested the information in Mr. Krefetz’s excellent book.”

-Lawrence S. Ritter, New York Times, Oct. 21, 1984

“Mr. Kriensky, who was born in Glasgow, studied at the Art Students League of New York and the Escuela de Tecnica in Mexico. He first worked with watercolors and then turned to oils to produce landscapes and portraits that were widely exhibited. … He was given one-man shows at the Knoedler Gallery in New York; the White House, sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt; the Frick Art Reference Library, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. His paintings are in the permanent collection of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and were shown in a 15-year retrospective at the University of Connecticut. He was the author of ”The Way Is Peace . . . The Road Is Love” (1973), a volume of drawings, paintings and poems, and ”Visions of Art and Life” (1976), which also blended paintings and poetry.”

-Wolfgang Saxon, New York Times, Feb. 23, 1998

“As often as not, Mr. Kriesberg’s work transcended category. Though it teemed with figures, frogs, birds, people, angels and much else, it was anything but representational. Normally small creatures tower and loom, dancers weave through space at unorthodox angles, and customarily static objects appear fluid and sinuous. All these things gave his work a sense of wit and mystery. … Mr. Kriesberg’s work, which also includes sculpture, is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Jewish Museum, all in New York, and Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington.”

-Margalit Fox, New York Times, Nov. 18, 2009
Photo: Matthias Kriesberg

“Shigeko Kubota was a Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who mostly lived in New York City. She was one of the first artists to adopt the portable video camera Sony Portapak in 1970. Kubota is known for constructing sculptural installations with a strong DIY aesthetic, which include sculptures with embedded monitors playing her original videos. She was a key member and influence on Fluxus.”
-Wikipedia
Photo: Tom Haar

Marion Lane held an MFA from Rutgers, a BS from William Patterson University and studied at the Art Students League and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She had a long and distinguished career as an artist working in a variety of media. Lane showed extensively in both solo and group shows spanning more than five decades, and was the recipient of numerous awards, including from the Brooklyn Museum where her work is included in the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art online database.
-Adapted from carterburdengallery.org/marion-lane

“In 1961 she and a classmate from Bard College, the pianist Ran Blake, performed as a duo at the Apollo Theater’s Amateur Night contest. They won, and the album they later recorded, ‘The Newest Sound Around’ (later reissued on CD as ‘The Legendary Duets’), has remained a cult favorite. … In the mid-1960’s she was a multidisciplinary artist, writing music with members of the Fluxus school like Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, and gradually becoming more aligned with the rest of the late-1960’s avant-garde in jazz. … When she met and fell in love with the vibraphonist and composer Gunter Hampel in 1967, she began 20 years of collaborations with him in different jazz-related forms.”

-Ben Ratliff, New York Times, Oct. 31, 2000
Photo: WBGO – courtesy of artist

“Mr. Lee was an actor, writer, producer and director, but above all he was one of puppetry’s most prolific and inventive designers. His evocative masks and figures were seen in productions by his own Mettawee River Theater Company and in shows by the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Shakespeare Festival, New York City Opera, Theater for the New City and various dance troupes and stage companies. … His menagerie ranged from hand puppets to fantastic figures that towered over the audience and were controlled by multiple puppeteers. … Masks were another Lee signature; his designs could be scary, sorrowful or phantasmagorical. … In [a] 1998 interview with The Times, he acknowledged that some of his work could be ephemeral, but he said that when he carved wooden masks for puppets, he was hoping for something more. ‘The sculptor in me wants to be immortalized in his work,’ he said. ‘I think I always had the urge to build things for eternity.’ ”
—Neil Genzlinger, New York Times, May 16, 2023
Still Photo: Ted Timreck from Westbeth Icon Evening

“A longtime West Village resident, [Peter Lombard] moved to New York in the late 1950s to pursue an acting career, and married Peggy Anne Watson in 1960. … He worked steadily on Broadway through the 1960s and ’70s, appearing in many plays, including ‘Generation’ (opposite Henry Fonda), ‘Carnival,’ ‘Promises, Promises’ (as Jerry Orbach’s understudy), ‘Conquering Hero’ (directed by Bob Fosse), ‘Pretty Belle’ (opposite Angela Lansbury) and ‘1776’ (as Thomas Jefferson).”

–The Villager, April 9, 2015

“Lishinsky had his first show at the 44th Street Gallery in 1946, and studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts, during the Summers of 1946-1948. He attended the Art Students League in New York City, and would later have eight one-man shows throughout the 1960s. … Lishinsky was a social activist and founded the Bronx Community Murals as a community project. In 1977 and 1979 Lishinsky and the community completed murals at the Westchester Square branch of the New York Public Library, in works entitled Celebration I and Celebration II, respectively. … [He] exhibited his works extensively both at home and abroad, including solo shows in Lisbon, Denver and Connecticut, and group shows in New York City, Denver and New Jersey.”

-Dylan Foley, The Last Bohemians, May 20, 2012

“Mr. Manship was born in New York City. While a student at Harvard, he converted to Roman Catholicism, and many of his paintings and sculptures were based on religious themes. … In a 50-year career, he had many one-man shows in the United States and Europe. … He was a leading authority on his father’s [sculptor Paul Manship] career. He published a biography, ‘Paul Manship,’ in 1989, and frequently lectured on and authenticated his father’s work.”

-New York Times, Nov. 22, 2000

“Manship began her remarkable journey in the field of sculpture when she won an international sculpture contest. This honor offered a three-year fellowship to the Villa Schifanoia in Florence, Italy, and culminated in her becoming the first master’s graduate at the Rosary College Graduate School. During this time Margaret also began a close association with the Italian master sculptor Antonio Berti, with whom she studied and assisted for several years. … Manship’s collaboration with Berti produced two significant works – the St. Louise de Marillac marble group that filled the last available niche in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the Alcide de Gasperi Monument in Trento, Italy.”

-Gloucester Times, Feb. 23, 2012

An abbreviated view of Jack’s acting career in a theatre program bio for Chain Lightning’s productions of Miss Julie and The Ghost Sonata at Tribeca Lab [1992]: “Jack R. Marks appeared at Woodstock in Love Me or Leave Me and at the Long Wharf Theatre in Some Sweet Day and The Rose Tattoo. He has appeared on Broadway in The Queen and the Rebels, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Hamlet. He also understudied for the Broadway production of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom as well as touring in Brighton Beach Memoirs. Mr. Marks has performed extensively at several regional theatres including the Guthrie, Yale Rep. Theatre, Goodspeed Opera House, Syracuse Stage and Buffalo’s Studio Arena. His film work includes Friday the 13th Part II, Ragtime, and Eyes of Laura Mars.”
Photo: Friday The 13th Part 2 movie still

“Ralph Martel worked ‘intensely and joyfully’ in his studio every day, recalls his son James Martel. … Growing up and later, James admired Ralph’s many skills, ‘He was good at a large number of things, welding, joinery, carpentry, and he made his own tools sometimes.’ James says his father knew [the] art of Intarsia, an Italian wood inlaying technique, and Japanese joinery and incorporated these intricate techniques in his wood sculptures which curve and flow with deceptive simplicity. … He was inventive and playful too. James recalls being fascinated with the way his father wielded a grease machine that spurted red lipstick grease into sculptural forms as the machine was moved from place to place. … He and other children from families who lived at Westbeth Artists Housing loved Ralph’s 20’-30’- long sculptures made of a synthetic material that he inflated and then deflated in the building courtyard.”
–U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, nyharbor.va.gov, March 28, 2018

“McNeely’s work is autobiographical, chronicling her experience with cancer and an illegal abortion before Roe vs. Wade. The paintings, which she made throughout the 1970s, show visceral imagery of contorted bodies, wounds and gauze covering up bloody and broken limbs. … ‘That’s my pain, that’s what you’re looking at,’ she told The Times. … Her depictions of an illegal abortion are a testament to her uncensored and unapologetic storytelling. McNeely calls on people to ‘be awake’ and pay attention to the ways the government controls individual agency. … ‘They’re letting their eyes close and letting themselves slip by the reality that is happening to other people,’ she said.”
-Steven Vargas, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 7, 2023
Photo: Whitney Museum of American Art still from video interview

“Charles Meyers … was a New York artist who began his career in 1959, when he studied art history at Columbia University. He experimented with canvas shapes early in his career to create the illusion of space through modular forms. In the 1960s, he studied the technique of gold leaf (vero oro) in Italy and incorporated the delicate foil in his abstract paintings. Generally painted with a wide stroke, his canvases express powerful movement in vivid and muted colors. The striking use of gold leaf creates a unique pattern which serves to punctuate the rhythm of the image.”
-westwoodgallery.com
Photo: neoimages.com

“Laura spent her entire life dedicated to the exploration of artistic pursuits in various media. Dedicating twenty-five years to a leadership position at Pace Editions gave her the opportunity to connect with many fine artists. She spent much of her post-retirement years as a nature photographer specializing in birds, and had photographs featured with the Audubon Society, the New York Times, and various books and magazines. Throughout her life, she worked in watercolor, sculpture, electrical work, photography, mixed media, and textiles. Even in her final days, she was dedicated to exploring how video and motion graphics could be used to express her connection with nature. She is missed.”
-Jeremy Meyers, June 23, 2022
Photo: Courtesy of Jeremy Meyers

“Mr. McGrath founded the Off Center Theatre in 1968 and was producing performances through 2017. … [He] was also a student of Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio and a veteran of the Broadway stage. He created the part of Big Eddie Stover in Truman Capote’s original 1952 production of The Grass Harp, directed by Robert Lewis. He also created the part of The Stranger in the original 1955 production of The Cherry Orchard, directed by David Ross. … [McGrath] created Off Center Theatre in order to give new playwrights a platform and to promote out of the box concepts within a proscenium setting.”

-vineyardgazette.com/obituaries/2018/05/01

“I worked with Tony and his wife, Abigail Rosen McGrath, in the Off Center Theatre for two or three years. We did offbeat versions of fairy tales in which we improvised our lines. I was little Red Riding Hood. Then Jack in Jack and the Beanstalk—lots of others. We toured the boroughs in a truck that opened to become a stage. It was like being part of a medieval company of players. Tony was a funny, kind, madcap, really decent and very creative person and an amazing actor and director.”

-Christina Maile, Jan. 2021

“Lennie was born and raised in Tottenham, England, where he started piano lessons at the age of 10, fell in love with jazz, and began playing in the local clubs, including Ronnie Scott’s and the Bebop Shop – appearing with notables such as Ronnie Scott, Dizzy Reece, and Denis Rose. He turned professional at age 25 and worked with Jimmy Skidmore, Terry Brown, Bill Eyden and Kenny Graham’s Afro-Cubists, among others. In the summer, he accompanied the famous Adelaide Hall in Jersey, UK. In 1958, Lennie joined the Cunard Line as band leader for his own sextet on the RMS Mauretania (2) based in London and cruising internationally.

[After settling in New York], for many years, Lennie appeared nightly at Manhattan nightclubs and supper clubs. Several times a year, Lennie also produced a British Music Hall show, employing a talented ensemble of performers donned in traditional pearly hats and coats, showcasing all the classic songs and jokes.”

-Excerpts from a memorial by Lennie’s daughter Alyssa Metcalfe

“Gay Milius was a painter, novelist, antique picker, and adventurer, and one of Westbeth’s pioneering residents. He studied painting at the School of Visual Arts, where his teachers included Malcolm Morley. His first works were in the style of the pre-Raphaelites. Later, however, he adopted the airbrush to produce lush, oversize photorealist canvases, many of them based on photos in old issues of True Detective. Their subject matter was noir, but their palette was soft and romantic. The painter and illustrator Edith Vonnegut recalls, ‘His airbrush technique was so rigorous and time consuming that it took years to complete anything. His art history knowledge was phenomenal, and his delivery was spectacularly eccentric and passionate.’ ”
-From the remembrances of Peter Trachtenberg, Rachel and Emily Paine, and Edie Vonnegut

“[Hal] Miller received his Actors’ Equity Association card in 1966 while working with Joseph Papp in Henry V and his Screen Actors Guild card in 1971 after being hired by Columbia Pictures. He appeared in the Lizzie Borden film Born in Flames … In 1968 he was invited to perform experimental, integrated theater for one season at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. From 1972 until 1974, Miller played Gordon on Sesame Street. Miller made the decision to leave Sesame Street for mainstream acting. [In his later career, he went on to performing and singing in Europe and Asia.]”

–Wikipedia.org

“Ms. Miles exhibited for many years with the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York during the gallery’s heyday, from 1943 to 1959. … More recently, she had solo shows in Manhattan at the Marilyn Pearl Gallery in 1988 and at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in 1994. … The paintings in the Shapolsky show were modest in scale, based on circular and starlike patterns done in shades of rich jade green interspersed with passages of gold leaf. Although abstract, they suggested both illuminated manuscript pages and mandalas. The work reflected both the artist’s long-standing interest in Asian art and thought, and her commitment to the spiritual implications of Western modernist art. … Her work is in the permanent collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Guggenheim, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Newark Museum and elsewhere.”

-Holland Cotter, New York Times, Sept. 3, 1999

“Gerald Monroe has been painting since the 1950’s, and he has buried his heart in a rhapsodic allegiance to gestural abstraction. He makes no fuss about it. … The deft paintings in his first New York show in four years display the dignity and restraint of a man who has spent all those past decades of chaotic pluralism doing what he always meant to do. And that is to make ‘art as an efficient communicator of feeling,’ he once wrote. ‘Not feeling with the emotional force of tragedy or comedy, but something more subtle, more elusive.’ ”

-Amei Wallach, New York Times, July 22, 2005

Bill Moor epitomized the term “working actor,” having appeared in major productions on and off Broadway, in film and on TV throughout a long, fruitful career.

From a review of an exhibition at the Robeson Center Gallery for the Arts at Rutgers-Newark: “Not the least unusual is the lineup of portraits on paper painted by Claire Moore. These are mostly frontal, direct piercing gazes by the artist, who is in her late 60’s. That her style resembles finger painting adds to the rawness of the message that the works convey: A woman confronting herself after having lived a full life. Ms. Moore is no Pollyanna full of acceptance, for most of these paintings bear terse messages that can look rubber-stamped, such as ‘If Time Could Turn Back and Take Another Route or Skip a Round.’ But in another, she has written next to her image, ‘You ask, “Am I Fearful?” No.’ ”

-William Zimmer, New York Times, July 19, 1987
Photo: The Wallflower by Claire Moore

“Hilda Morley, an American poet who gained wider recognition late in life, decades after she first published her imagist free verse, died on Monday. … She was 81 and had moved to London last year to continue work on a biography of her late husband, the avant-garde composer Stefan Wolpe. … Ms. Morley published five books of poetry in which she articulated emotions and feelings in free verse, but a type of verse as measured as dance or music. She was a ‘master of that ability,’ Robert Creeley, a fellow poet, said.”

-Wolfgang Saxon, New York Times, March 27, 1998

“From 1951 to 1968, Mrs. Morris was the literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Herself a writer and critic of modern fiction, she helped to introduce many fresh American authors to the reading public. … PEN International awarded her a Sue Kaufman Lifetime Achievement Award in 1977 for the editorial assistance she had given to new and emerging writers. … She was the editor of ‘The Uncommon Reader’ (Avon Books, 1965), a selection of 35 outstanding short stories she had steered toward publication in Harper’s Bazaar. She also wrote a book of poems, ‘Crane on the Hackmatack.’ At her death she was working on a series of humorous poems.”

-New York Times, Sept. 30, 1993

“Mr. Moses was a co-founder of the Free Southern Theater, a pioneering black touring company. In 1976 he and George Faison directed, staged and choreographed the Leonard Bernstein-Alan Jay Lerner musical ‘1600 Pennsylvania Avenue’ on Broadway … The director’s emergence coincided with the proliferation of other black theater artists, beginning in 1969 with [Amiri] Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, and his play ‘Slave Ship’ at the Chelsea Theater Center. Mr. Moses won an Obie Award for his striking production. After directing plays at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and the Arena Stage in Washington, he moved to Broadway in 1971 as the director of [Melvin] Van Peebles’s earthy inner-city musical, ‘Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death.’ … He went on to direct [Ed] Bullins’s ‘Taking of Miss Janie,’ at the Henry Street Settlement and then at Lincoln Center.”

-Mel Gussow, New York Times, April 18, 1995
-Photo: If You Don’t Know, Now You Know (Facebook page)

“Robert Watson Munford was an American artist, educator, and founding member of the artist group Group Ibiza 59 in Spain. His artwork is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg (Germany). He was a pop art pioneer.”

-Wikipedia

“In 1950 he moved to New York where he joined the Art Students League and worked restoring Chinese antiques in exchange for studio space. During the war, Mukai collected material and equipment and assumed that he would paint about his war experience. Once he returned, however, Mukai felt that he had experienced the war enough already and did not need to paint it. He focused on still-lifes and streetscapes and only painted two versions of one war painting, In a Twinkling of an Eye.”

-discovernikkei.org

“Mr. Muranyi … was among a handful of jazz musicians who began their careers in the 1950s but looked to an earlier era for inspiration. Although he once studied with the forward-thinking pianist and composer Lennie Tristano, he spent most of his career with Dixieland bands, and he was widely regarded as one of the premier clarinetists in that genre.”

-Peter Keepnews, New York Times, April 28, 2012

“Her paintings will be with us for years and years to come, teasing us, resisting us, giving life to something in her that could only find expression in an almost erotic sense of color and shape. People will come upon her work and wonder about the woman who made it, and she will take the place that every artist eventually takes — overshadowed by the constructs of her imagination.”

-Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times, Aug. 14, 2007
Photo: InOutStudio

“Mr. Niizuma was born in Tokyo and … moved to New York in 1959 and had his first solo show in New York City at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1966. … He worked predominantly in stone, especially marble, and was known for his sensitive use of its textures and veins. His designs ranged from the geometric to the organic and sometimes used patterns reminiscent of folk art, fabrics and ritual vessels. … His work is in public collections in the United States, Europe and Japan, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Museum of Modern Art in Japan.”

-New York Times, Sept. 29, 1998

“Hedy O’Beil, a New York City native, attended art schools and studied with several renowned artists, including with Reuben Tam at the Brooklyn Museum of Art School. … O’Beil’s paintings can best be described as gestural abstraction, and are unique in the use of her signature palette that makes adroit use of rich pinks, blues, and yellows layered in perfect harmony with ethereal grays and translucent whites. Her work is a study in the tension between control and unbridled exuberance, as if watching an improvised jazz masterpiece unfold before your eyes. … [She] has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant [and] the American Academy of Arts and Letters.”
-carterburdengallery.org/hedy-obeil

“Over the course of the 1960’s Okoshi had developed a new style and technique that would come to define her work. Okoshi paints with oil on canvas and then places uniform ellipses of washi paper imported from Japan she has cut and colored into a grid on top of the paint. This meticulous and exacting process takes immense amounts of time.This technique is used in two numbered series of paintings entitled Persistent Light and Plenum … The Persistent Light and Plenum series evoke rain spattering on a window with an almost pixilated effect. Like in her earlier work recognizable forms appear to be just beyond sight. They emerge like the shadows of ruins through the smoke of a bombed out city. Yet they also evoke a calm bustle – an eerily mundane optimism.”

– Dylan Yeats, Invaluable.com

“He began his editing career with the seminal ‘Paris is Burning,’ directed by Jennie Livingston. He devoted his career to documentary storytelling and edited over 24 films, including the Oscar-nominated films ‘Streetwise’ (1984), ‘Children Underground’ (2001), and ‘The Oath’ (2010). He was also the co-editor of ‘William and the Windmill’ (2013), winner of the Grand Jury Prize and SXSW, and a story consultant on many films, including ‘How to Survive a Plague’ and ‘Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.’ ”

-Janet W. Lee, Variety.com, July 20, 2020

“Mr. Oppenheimer was author of a number of volumes of poetry. … He also wrote two nonfiction books, ‘Marilyn Lives,’ about Marilyn Monroe, and ‘The Wrong Season,’ about the 1972 New York Mets. … He was the first director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery Episcopal Church in Manhattan from 1966 to 1972, where he introduced many poets who read from their own works. From 1969 to 1984, he was a columnist for The Village Voice.”

– New York Times, Oct. 13, 1988

Art Ostrin was the epitome of the working actor, appearing on and off Broadway and touring the U.S. And in the ’70s, as the New York Times wrote, he was also the co-owner of Early Halloween, a store in Chelsea recommended as a “good source for vintage clothes and memorabilia … The orientation here is theatrical, which is hardly surprising. It is owned by an actor, Art Ostrin, and his sister, Joyce Ostrin, who minds the store when he is away on tour.”

-Ruth Robinson, New York Times, May 21, 1974

“David had many careers—including professor, writer, community activist, actor, producer, and journalist. After graduating from Harvard, he earned a master’s degree from the London School of Economics. During the first part of his career, as a reporter, he covered the civil rights movement and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. … He wrote about Asian-American arts and performers, including for Bridge Magazine … and the New York Times, at a time when they were receiving little attention. … In 1979, he led a public protest against the Public Theater in New York, and its producer, Joseph Papp, for their failure to cast Asian Americans in a play with three Asian characters—he ultimately won and went on to help produce the first Asian-American plays there: Wakako Yamauchi’s ‘The Music Lesson’ and David Henry Hwang’s ‘FOB.’ … For the final two decades of his career, David returned to journalism as an editor and writer at the Wall Street Journal.”
-Excerpted from an obituary by the Oyama family, April 2023
Photo: Courtesy of Rebecca Oyama

“Mr. Paik’s career spanned half a century, three continents and several art mediums, ranging through music, theater and found-object art. He once built his own robot. But his chief means of expression was television, which he approached with a winning combination of visionary wildness, technological savvy and high entertainment values. His work could be kitschy, visually dazzling and profound, sometimes all at once, and was often irresistibly funny and high-spirited. … At his best, Mr. Paik exaggerated and subverted accepted notions about both the culture and the technology of television while immersing viewers in its visual beauty and exposing something deeply irrational at its center. He presciently coined the term ‘electronic superhighway’ in 1974, grasping the essence of global communications and seeing the possibilities of technologies that were barely born.”

-Roberta Smith, New York Times, Jan. 31, 2006
Photo: Tom Haar

“At the peak of her five-decade teaching career, which began in 1973 and lasted until a few months before her death, Ms. Panetta, who lived in Manhattan, spent half of each year in Europe teaching her signature method, which she called Ballet for Contemporary Dancers. … She taught at prestigious institutions like P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studio) in Brussels and Vienna’s ImPulsTanz festival. And for two decades she was a vital presence in Pina Bausch’s company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, where she taught daily ballet classes at the company’s studio in Wuppertal, in western Germany, and on its worldwide tours. … Dancers also flocked to Panetta Movement Center, the studio Ms. Panetta opened in 2003 in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. On any given day her class might include members of the Merce Cunningham and Jose Limón companies, independent artists seeking ballet lessons free of traditional formality, and neo-burlesque performers helping to revive that genre.”
-Claudia Bauer, New York Times, Dec. 8, 2023
Photo: FSK HUB

“In the early 1950s, Johnny Parker, who was not related to the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, began traveling with the Rhythm & Blues band of Roosevelt Sykes. Johnny Parker also played with the great trumpet stylist and composer Sy Oliver and the singer Etta Jones. He also stepped in for Cat Anderson, the high-note trumpet virtuoso, in the Duke Ellington band. … He later played with such luminaries as Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk. In the 1970s he played with the pianist Brooks Kerr and the drummer Sonny Greer in Manhattan venues including the Algonquin Hotel.”
—amNY, April 4, 2006
Photo: amNY

In the mid-1970s, Brandy Penn worked with Spiderwoman Theater on their earliest productions, Women in Violence and Lysistrata Numbah. She was a performer and wrote the lyrics for the song “I Want You in the Home” used in a Spiderwoman production. Gloria Miguel, founding member of Spiderwoman, had these memories of Brandy, who was a close friend of hers for many years:

I knew her since 1976. She was in the first rehearsals and first performances of Women in Violence. We were very close. That whole group was close. We were personal with what we did. Brandy offered her husband’s studio in the Westbeth courtyard for us, and he said that was great. We rehearsed Women in Violence completely there. Her character was a deer. She wrote a beautiful song, “I Want You in the Home”: “Let me make the way for you. I want you, I need you …” It was all about a man wanting a woman to be his own entity, not going out and doing something on her own. And she danced and sang. But when we started to go on tour, she had two little girls, so she couldn’t leave. She was only with us about a year. When we started to go to Europe and stayed six months, you had to be free.

-Gloria Miguel as told to Terry Stoller, July 2021
Photo: Sarah Jenkins. From Women in Violence production photo

“In the early 1960s, in New York, Mr. Perez was among a cohort of avant-garde artists who blurred the lines of their disciplines and employed all sorts of quotidian and often absurdist actions in their work. Performance art and conceptual art, experimental theater, music and dance seemed all of a piece, their practitioners united in challenging traditions. Many of them were members of Judson Dance Theater, an experimental collective in Greenwich Village.
“The collective was short-lived—it began in the fall of 1962 and lasted only a few years —but it was influential. … Mr. Perez later carried the Judson spirit with him, in pieces that defied categories and narratives. … In 1966 … Mr. Perez performed what would become one of his best-known works, ‘Countdown,’ in which he sat majestically on a stool smoking a cigarette, his face impassive but streaked with paint, as a recording of French folk songs played.”
-Penelope Green, New York Times, Oct. 14 and 18, 2023

Nell Perret’s credits include printmaking, book illustration, and graphic arts instruction.

-Image: Noon Interlude

“She was a feminist artist who was one of the principal founders and organizers of the entire women’s art movement (especially on east coast). She organized the first show of 2nd Wave women artists … was a founder of the first feminist art school, the Feminist Art Institute … She was one of founders of the New York Studio School for Drawing, Painting and Sculpture … With another feminist artist, Pat Manairdi, Irene founded the journal Women & Art, which helped to make the great portraitist Alice Neel famous. … Irene was a founding member of Redstockings, the leading Feminist women’s theoretical and consciousness-raising group in New York City.”

–Rosalyn Baxandall, veteranfeministsofamerica.org

-Portrait by Alice Neel (detail)

Asked by musician Andrew Schulman about what he had done for a living, John responded, “A lot of things. I was a longshoreman, worked in construction, the hotel business. I’ve lived in Westbeth, one of New York’s oldest artist communities, for years. I got in there because I’m a poet, always have been, even when I worked those day jobs. … My poetry came out of an early love—a passion for storytelling, both in the giving and receiving. It brings me joy. ‘Joy’ is my favorite word.”

–From Waking the Spirit: A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul by Andrew Schulman, 2016
Photo: From Elijah White film on John Peters

“Throughout his long career as an artist, Donald Pierce has recognized that juxtaposing familiar things in unfamiliar ways is both the method of assemblage and the essence of humor. Pierce displays a singular gift for transforming castoff found objects into wry totemic artifacts of modern life. … His work is represented in such distinguished public collections as the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, Rutgers University, the Slater Memorial Museum, the San Diego Museum of Fine Arts, and others.”

-Dome Gallery, New York City, press release, “Works for Walls,” March 5 – April 2, 1991

“A memorial reading in honor of poet and fisherman Allen Planz, a regular on the East End and Manhattan poetry scenes for more than 50 years and former poetry editor of The Nation, will be held at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton … Fourteen books of Mr. Planz’s poetry and hundreds of his articles have been published. He was the recipient of numerous awards and endowments, including an award from the North Sea Poet Society in 2005 and a 1976 Pushcart Prize.”

-Southampton Press, May 18, 2010
-Photo: Ryan D. Curtis

“When I met him in 1984, Cary was co-director (with Sensei Andy Diaz) of the Martial Arts Conservatory, a karate dojo in New York’s Greenwich Village. … A skilled karateka who was proficient with several weapons, Cary was also an actor who appeared in many films and TV shows, including Someone to Watch Over Me. … I know he went on to become a physical therapist, and he continued to live in his Westbeth apartment.”

-tannerthepitbull.blogspot.com

“Elizabeth Pollet was the daughter of Joseph Pollet, a prominent Greenwich Village painter. She was a statuesque woman with high cheekbones, and was one of the great beauties of the 1950s intellectual scene. Pollet met the poet Delmore Schwartz not long after she graduated from the University of Chicago in the early 1940s. Their tumultuous relationship lasted 15 years, ending in 1957. Pollet was the author of the best-selling novel A Family Romance.”

—Dylan Foley, The Last Bohemians, June 23, 2012

“Mr. Pollet’s works are owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Newark Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and others. During the 1920’s and later, he had one-man shows at the Whitney, the Downtown Gallery, the Julien Levy Gallery and the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, where he had three such exhibitions in the 1960’s.”

-New York Times, May 29, 1979
Photo: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

“Ned Polsky … is best known and will no doubt be remembered by sociologists for his ventures into the field of deviance. The five essays that make up his book Hustlers, Beats and Others, recently republished in an updated edition by Lyons Press, are both sociological and literary masterpieces indicative of the author’s ambitions and perspectives. … He loved books, of which he was an avid collector, had a passion for literature and the arts, had tried his hand at writing a serious novel, played pool well enough to have participated in several tournaments. … During his career, he was in and out of publishing, was the editor of several prestigious magazines, became professor at SUNY-Stony Brook and, after retiring, opened and ultimately sold an antiquarian book business specializing in biographies.”

-Kurt Lang, Footnotes, November 2000, asanet.org

“Although born in Miami, Florida, Michael Ponce de León grew up in Mexico City, where he received his education. While he studied architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, he also became interested in drawing. He began to publish cartoons in popular magazines like The New Yorker after serving in the U.S. Air Force during the 1940s. After World War II, his cartoon series titled Impulses was syndicated in the United States and Europe. … In the 1950s and 1960s he was the recipient of several grants, including a Guggenheim and two Fulbrights. … In 1964 he was commissioned by the U.S. Post Office to design a stamp celebrating the fine arts, and between 1965 and 1982 he was sent by the State Department to a number of countries in cultural exchange programs. He has exhibited in London, Paris, and Venice as well as in New York and Washington, D.C. His works, especially his collages and intaglios, are represented in permanent collections all over the world.”
-Matt S. Meier and Margot Gutiérrez, The Mexican American Experience: An Encyclopedia, 2003.
Photo: Tom Haar

“In 1967, after settling once again in New York, Ramírez Villamizar dedicated himself to his sculpture in the round. His Column (American Bank, 1967) was the first monumental work he made in the United States. The sculptures of this period had great dynamic and rhythmic sense, with planes and forms that seemed to move through space. Some had a floating aspect, which was obtained by the virtual elimination of their support. In 1969, he represented Colombia at the 10th Biennial de São Paulo, where he was awarded the second international prize. During the early years of the 1970s, he produced numerous monumental sculptures in the United States, among them De Colombia a John Kennedy (Kennedy Center, Washington D.C., 1973), a gift from the Colombian Government to the American nation.”
-Juan Carlos Maldonado Art Collection, jcmac.art

“Mr. Reagon was 16 in 1959 when he emerged as a leader of the civil rights movement in Albany, Ga. … In 1962 he became a founder of the Freedom Singers, usually a quartet of two men and two women who sang gospel-style freedom songs to rouse support for the civil rights movement. … In the late 1960’s and early 70’s, Mr. Reagon became active in the movements against the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction. … In 1988 he moved to Berkeley, where he founded the environmental group Urban Habitat and Urban Justice Organization.”

-Lawrence Van Gelder, New York Times, Nov. 19, 1996
– Charlotta Janssen painting of Cordell Reagon for her series on Freedom Fighters.

“John (Russell) Ridge was a commercial sculptor and actor. He designed the New York City Bicentennial Medal and created many fine art commissions for clients around the world. As a character actor and a member of Equity, SAG, and AFTRA, he appeared off and on Broadway, as well as in numerous commercials, films, and industrials, often playing foreign characters and comic roles. He studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School as a child, and later at the Art Students League. He received a degree in English from Long Island University, where he appeared in the first stage play at LIU, as the lead in Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid. John was one of the first tenants at Westbeth, beginning in February 1970.”
-Mary Ridge, November 2021
Photo: Mary Ridge

Marilyn Joan Roberts “studied acting with Master teachers Eric Morris and Lee Strasberg in New York and was a member of the original La Mama Troupe under the direction of Tom O’Horgan, appearing throughout the United States, at European festivals including Spoleto, Italy; Edinburgh, Scotland; and in the London West End production of Tom Paine by Paul Foster. … TV and film appearances include special guest star on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a featured role in the film Looking for Mr. Goodbar, as well as being featured in the film version of Futz (Mrs.Loop). Futz was originally a groundbreaking Off-Off Broadway production and later opened Off Broadway at the Theatre de Lys, 1968.”

-Broadwayworld.com, Feb. 25, 2021
Photo: Aaron R. Foster

From a review in the New York Times, April 14, 1989: “On East 57th Street, at the Cyrus Gallery, are the thoughtful, vibrantly colored canvases of Leatrice Rose, an artist who like Ms. Bourgeois has exhibited in New York City for more than 30 years. Ms. Rose specializes in the well-crafted still-life arrangement, but her landscape passages, which echo the flat, verdant density of Matisse in the 30’s, are also impressive.”

-Roberta Smith
Photo: painting by Leatrice Rose

“Sacharow, known to peers, colleagues and students alike as a humane and daring director, tangled with some of the most challenging works of modern theater, including plays by Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov and Sam Shepard. … For his direction in 1994 of Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, ‘Three Tall Women,’ Sacharow received the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Direction and was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle award. In 2003, Sacharow directed the highly celebrated off-Broadway production of ‘Beckett/Albee,’ an evening of one-act plays starring Marian Seldes and Brian Murray.”
-Fordham News, Aug. 15, 2006
-Photo: Fordham News

“A child of immigrant parents, Lucia Autorino was born in New York City at the end of World War I. She studied at the National Academy of Design as well as the Art Students League, and in 1940 was awarded a scholarship to study with Hilla Rebay at the Museum of Non-Objective Art—the original name of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Autorino’s conservative style was transformed under the influence of the European-born Rebay, who introduced a generation of Americans, including Guggenheim, to the latest trends in abstraction. … Autorino worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and taught at the Art Students League and New York University. … She is the author of three books on painting.”

-NYPL, Prints With/Out Pressure: American Relief Prints from the 1940s through the 1960s

“A composer and Conceptual photographer, Cosmos primarily photographed the intersecting worlds of music, art, theater, and film in 1970s New York. While some of his images of art installations appeared in Avalanche magazine, and his shots of celebrities appeared in New York magazine, the vast majority of his thousands of images were never published. Cosmos stored them in boxes in his studio at Westbeth Artists Community, where he lived for forty-one years.”
-Annette Leddy, Oct. 13, 2016, The Primary Source/The Blog, Archives of American Art
Photo: Archives of American Art

“When Scherer was 19, luck intervened: a family friend heard that the American Museum of Natural History was looking for a young apprentice artist. He applied with a painting and clay model of a polar bear and got the job. In 1934 Scherer was trained under George Peterson to learn how to make accessories such as plants, rocks and trees for the Museum’s dioramas. During this time he also worked in the anthropology department restoring archeological objects of endlessly diverse materials such as wood, stone, metal, tapestry, bone and ceramics. Scherer went on to work for the museum for 38 years, painting backgrounds for over fifteen dioramas that are still on display in The Chapman Memorial Bird Hall, The African Hall and The North American Hall. ”

-Biography, fredfscherer.com
Photo: Deirdre Scherer, fredfscherer.com

Charles Schwartz is the composer of Professor Jive: A Jazz Symphony (featuring trumpeter Clark Terry); he was a professor of music, an impresario, and author of Gershwin: His Life & Music and Cole Porter: A Biography.
-Hachette Book Group

“From 1957 until the mid-1990s, he produced concert series under the titles ‘Composers’ Showcase’ and ‘Jazz Profiles’ (both eventually under the former title), presenting concerts of new music and jazz at the Whitney Museum, Circle in the Square, the Museum of Modern Art, and Lincoln Center. … He continuously composed his own music, including symphonies, string quartets, popular song, works for wind and percussion, and chamber pieces. He also wrote, performed, and recorded several ‘jazz symphonies’ and other smaller works combining elements of jazz and classical music and featuring such jazz artists as Clark Terry, Cab Calloway, Sonny Fortune, Freddie Hubbard and Jon Hendricks.”
-macdowell.org

“Prior to living at Westbeth, David Seccombe had a loft in the Village with an attic studio. His sculptures were put together and lowered out a window to the street. He showed at the Brata Gallery, a co-op on 3rd Avenue, in the ’60s. Later his work was exhibited in Bridgehampton, L.I., Battery Park, Penn’s Landing Philadelphia, the Detroit Institute of Art, Socrates Sculpture Park, O.K. Harris Gallery and the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He is a recipient of support from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and a major grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.”
-Westbeth.org

“The interval between death and renewal is what Shelley Seccombe has so beautifully documented. Here, in these images, we can still find the ghostly ruins that have since been lost, as well as the new reality: the splendid park that has taken their place. The richness of such a photographic record can only have resulted from a highly skillful photographer’s persistence in examining the same subject for years, for decades.”

—Phillip Lopate, from Introduction to Lost Waterfront: The Decline and Rebirth of Manhattan’s Western Shore, 2007
Photo: Selfie in the Mirror

About writing poetry after forty years of practicing his art, Hugh Seidman said, “In very practical terms, it’s a matter of what you’re able to do. You get up in the morning, and what are you going to do for the rest of the day if you don’t have to go to your money job? What are you going to do for the rest of the day? For me, it comes down to that. It’s what I have been able to do. For whatever reason, I needed to create something, and poetry seems to be what I can do. I wrote Gilbert Sorrentino a fan letter once in 1969. I had never met him before. I still lived uptown. He wrote back to me, and he said, ‘My own art is a small one, a fragile one, if that is the word. But what I say I know. It is mine.’ And I feel like that. Whatever my own art is, it is mine. And I need to keep doing it—so far.”
-Told to Terry Stoller in “Profiles in Art,” Westbeth.org, July 2013
-Photo: Jayne Holsinger

“Ms. Selz was a teacher, a short-story writer, a former writer-in-residence at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and one of the three founding editors of Story Quarterly. … Her fiction appeared in many magazines, including Partisan Review, Antaeus, and Chicago, and has been anthologized in ‘Best American Short Stories’ and the O Henry Awards. For more than 30 years, she compiled and wrote the biographies, and interviewed the artists, for the show and catalogue, ‘Modern Odysseys: Greek American Artists of the 20th Century, Queens Museum of Art 2000.’ ”

-27east.com/southampton-press, June 23, 2010
Photo: Southampton Press

“In the early 1970s, I met Gina Shamus, an artist who also lived at Westbeth. I enrolled in her pottery classes, which she gave in her apartment on the third floor. … She was a great teacher, and she had a gas kiln in the Sculpture Studio located in the basement of the building. … After Gina stopped giving her pottery classes, she branched out into photography. She used her artistic talent as a photographer to create note cards, which she sold in local gift shops on Hudson Street. … Gina was a multitalented artist who fervently contributed to the growth and blossoming of the Westbeth Artists Housing complex.”
—Susan K. Binet, Westbeth Chronicles, 2022
Photo: Mirja Hovila-de Grab

“Tom Shooter had a one-person exhibit in the Westbeth Gallery, October 4 to November 2, 2003. It was a very strong exhibit. He presented large oil paintings that in most instances dealt with the still ongoing AIDS crisis. The work was very compelling by showing the reality of an AIDS patient’s physical condition to the viewer. Most viewers were emotionally moved by the work, and for some it brought tears.”

—Jack Dowling, Westbeth artist and curator, Aug. 31, 2019

“Abstract expressionist painter Morris Shulman studied at the National Academy of Design, Art Students League and Hans Hofmann School of Art in New York City. Shulman held teaching positions at the Brooklyn Museum School and School of Visual Art in New York City, Philadelphia College of Art and at the Skowhegan Art School in Maine. Shulman’s work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Colby College, Parsons School of Design, Brooklyn Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.”

-wiscassetbaygallery.com
Image: The Miner by Morris Shulman in the collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum

“As we celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Goodnewsforpets.com, we pay tribute to the legendary Mordecai Siegal, a longtime goodnewsforpets.com columnist who passed away on April 1, 2010. … A pet writer of over 35 books, he was also president emeritus of the Dog Writers Association of America (DWAA) and a founding member of the Cat Writers’ Association. He was born in Philadelphia but spent most of his adult life as a New Yorker.”

-Goodnewsforpets.com, Feb. 19, 2020
Photo: Shel Secunda

“Martin Siegel, a poet who worked in the community relations division of the Parks Department, died … of Hodgkin’s disease. … Mr. Siegel’s poems were anthologized in “The Westbeth Poets” and were published in several magazines. He was also the author of a novel, “Agent of Entropy,” published by Lancer in 1969. [His sci-fi novel ‘The Unreal People’ was published in 1973].”

-New York Times, March 12, 1972
Photo: Book cover by Ron Walotsky

“Much of what Sigel does is accompanied by mistakes and accidents, in the sense that everything is there by accident–boats, lighthouses, crucifixions–and that his process of forming images and pictures parallels the accidental nature of the world we experience every day. Everything in the world is useful to us, or at least we have learned to fit everything into our concept of a useful world. But what is it when it is not being useful, when it is in the mode of having no particular meaning in our lives–that is, most of the time. Then we are immersed, at least visually, in a universe of shapes and colors and how they relate to one another, a universe from which the language of art issues. This language, as Sigel understands, is no more fixed than the world–our ordinary, unkempt, flea market world–from which it comes. It depends on accident, and it is this that his screenprints, particularly, insist upon.”

-Donald Goddard, “SigelReeceWay: An Exhibition by Barry ‘Butch’ Sigel, Jesse Reece, Jeff Way,” Art Review, New York Art World, 2004
-Barry Sigel self-portrait

“Renowned internationally for his massive community art installations, Pedro [Pablo Silva] galvanized over 3,000 people from all walks of life to participate in creating the beautiful mosaic benches surrounding Grant’s Tomb. He designed similarly ambitious projects in Nashville, Chicago, and Scotland.”

-Legacy.com, June 23, 2013
Photo: gcanews.com

The print featured in this article “was created by Miriam Sommerburg sometime in 1944 or 1945, while she was living at the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter in Oswego, New York. Entitled ‘Behind the Fence’ or ‘The Golden Cage,’ the print was used as an advertisement for a musical that she wrote about her journey to the United States and life at Fort Ontario, also called ‘The Golden Cage.’ The refugees being held at the shelter performed this musical at the camp in 1945, noting their gratitude to the United States, but lamenting the fact that they lived behind a barbed wire fence at Fort Ontario.”
-https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/behind-the-fence-inked-print-by-miriam-sommerburg
-Photo: The Herbert and Leni Sonnenfeld Collection, Beit Hatfutsot Museum, Israel; accessed at https://safehaven.oncell.com/en/chapter-4-248471.html

“There is no other American writer whose oeuvre remotely resembles that of Gilbert Sorrentino, and it is tempting to say that no other living American can match his artistic achievement. It is the diversity of his artistry that separates him from his peers. As a poet, he has written works of a uniquely American flavor in the lyric vein of William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley; he has also written dazzlingly baroque verse that reveals the influence of the French symbolists and Guillaume Apollinaire. His novels comprise his most important contribution to literature, and once again, it is the sheer diversity that is arresting. Sorrentino has written dark, fatalistic novels like The Sky Changes; hilarious satires like Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things; impassioned aesthetic manifestoes like Splendide-Hotel; and towering metafictions like Mulligan Stew.”

-David Andrews, The Review of Contemporary Fiction Fall, 2001
-Photo: Wikipedia

“George Spaventa studied at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York and the Académie Grand Chaumier in Paris. He was inspired by the work of European sculptors, including Auguste Rodin and Alberto Giacometti, and created small works in bronze that explored the human figure. His sculptures often employed single figures in meditative poses, conveying a sense of isolation that reflected Spaventa’s solitary experience. He expressed his emotions through his materials, molding the wax or plaster with his hands so that the bronze retained vivid imprints of his touch.”

-Smithsonian American Art Museum
Photo: 1979 Gruenebaum Gallery catalogue

At the age of 27, Kenneth Staack designed St. Alice Church in Springfield, Oregon; it received an award of merit from the 1966 Liturgical Convention in Houston. And “he spearheaded a progressive Catholic movement at the NYU chapel in the early ’60s. There, he met Joya Wyant, his wife of 53 years. Fifty of those years were lived at Westbeth, the artists’ housing in lower Manhattan, where they raised their three sons, Peter, John, and David. He worked for twenty years, until his retirement, for the U.S. Postal Service as an architect and historical preservationist for post offices and facilities in the tri-state area.”

-New York Times, Dec. 12, 2020
Photo: Ken as MC at Westbeth’s 10th anniversary

In the early ’80s, Ken also designed the Westbeth Community Room, turning raw space into a meeting place that included a kitchen, ambient lighting and storage closets—which are still in use.
-Eds.

“For much of her life she was a dancer, one who eventually headed her own dance company and traveled the world. Two years ago, a year from her ninth decade on the planet, Stephen took classes at Manhattan Neighborhood Network and learned how to operate a video camera and sound equipment. Last month a feature she directed, ‘Split/Scream, A Saga of Westbeth Artist Housing,’ won Stephen an outstanding achievement award from the New York International Film Festival. Ask her, and she’ll say it’s no big deal. ‘All my life has been an improvisation,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a script. I just do it.’ ”
-Clem Richardson, New York Daily News, Aug. 2, 2010

“Rosalyn Stern of New York has been a favorite in the past two Pratt Graphic Center International Miniature Print exhibits shown locally at Troup Gallery. An experimenter with Lucite plates and combining zinc and collagraph plates, her abstractions with deep rich tones have been in many travelling national and international shows including cultural exchange shows sponsored by our State Department in Caracas, Venezuela, and Warsaw, Poland. National exhibitions include the Boston Printmakers, National Academy of Design, Philadelphia Print Club and the Oklahoma National Print and Drawing Exhibition.”

-Dallas Times Herald review, April 27, 1969

From a review of a Westbeth exhibition titled “Maniacalaughter”: “Finally, I liked the haunting assemblages of R. Patrick Sullivan. … Sullivan’s things—frequently in the best sense and infrequently in the worst, ‘precious’—exploit the musky charm of decaying wood, old toys, costume jewelry and assorted bric‐a‐brac with arcane jokiness and a marvelous sense of ‘decadent’ stylishness.”

-Peter Schjeldahl, New York Times, Sept. 19, 1971

“Ms. Sultan was a matter-of-fact proponent of the avant-garde. Her calling cards included Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which she performed with all the repeats in downtown New York and, later, in uptown concert halls . . . But Ms. Sultan was open to all kinds of music. She met [John] Cage in 1945; his ‘Études Australes’ from the mid-1970’s, based on notes derived from star charts, were written for her. Other contemporary composers whose works she performed included Earle Brown, Stefan Wolpe, Alan Hovhaness, Ben Weber and Christian Wolff, one of her students. She said in a 1996 interview: ‘Music is music. That’s all.’ ”

–Anne Midgette, New York Times, July 3, 2005
Photo: Marilyn Schwartz

“Don Sunseri, an artist, teacher and the founding director of Grace, an art workshop program for the handicapped and elderly that became a national model, died on July 19 at his home in West Glover, Vt. … Mr. Sunseri was born in Chicago. … He moved to New York in the late 1960’s, taught art at the Little Red School House and exhibited his work with the O. K. Harris Gallery in SoHo. He moved permanently to West Glover in 1974. … After tiring of teaching art, he took a job in the kitchen of a nursing home. He soon found himself awed by the art its residents were making, and he initiated a program of minimally directed classes. ‘I saw something incredible going on,’ he said. ‘I eventually figured out what I was not doing, and I tried to stay with that approach.’ … By 2000 Grace had a staff of seven, a board of directors and scores of volunteers and received regular grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.”

-Roberta Smith, New York Times, July 28, 2001
Photo: Artnet

“The artist Tania, who adopted the mononym in 1958 after working under a number of married names through the 1940s and early ’50s, created art in a wide range of mediums (painting, sculpture, works on paper, and collage), but is perhaps most well known for her wall murals. In particular, she is recognized for a highly visible monumental wall painting from 1970 that stretches 13 stories along the side of a Greenwich Village high rise. Not only exemplary of Tania’s typical abstract style, the work also represents her interest in public art.”

-artspace.com
Photo: Wikipedia

In 1966, Tecla, Benny Andrews, and Alice Neel were in a three-person art exhibition at the Countee Cullen branch of the New York Public Library.
—Benny Andrews.com/cvchronology

Tecla also participated in the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition protest of the “Harlem on My Mind” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1969). Tecla’s family has donated much of her work to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.
—teclaselnick.com
Painting: Tecla website

“Megan Terry [was] an Obie Award winner, a founding member of the Open Theater group and a prolific feminist playwright. … Ms. Terry’s ‘Viet Rock: A Folk War Movie’ opened at the Martinique Theater, an Off Broadway house, on Nov. 10, 1966, during the Vietnam War, after earlier performances at the Yale Repertory Company and La MaMa E.T.C. in the East Village. … ‘Viet Rock’ was believed to be the first American stage work to address the Vietnam War. ‘The piece ended with an image of rebirth,’ the critic Dan Sullivan wrote in the Los Angeles Times, ‘but the image that stayed with the viewer was a mound of dead soldiers, male and female, muttering Who needs this?’.”

-Anita Gates, New York Times, April 24, 2023
Photo: Broadway Play Publishing

“Life here is great, the building is full of nice and intelligent people, great children, the staff is friendly and efficient. Since I live here, I feel I am not just painting for my own pleasure, but that I am fulfilling a social function.”
—Joachim Themal, “Westbeth, Yes,” in “Art Mailbag,” New York Times, May 6, 1973

“Born in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, Ting was raised in Shanghai. It is said that he began painting on the sidewalks at 4 years old and started creative painting on outdoor walls at 10. He briefly attended the Shanghai Art Academy, but always considered himself to be a self-taught artist. In 1952, he emigrated to Paris, where he formed close friendships with various members of the CoBrA expressionist group (a European avant-garde movement) that drew inspiration from children’s paintings and primitive art. In 1958, Ting moved to New York where abstract expressionism and pop art were at their peak. There he met Sam Francis and Andy Warhol, and they became close friends. Despite these close relationships, he never considered himself to be a part of any artistic movement or group. As an artist, he prided himself on his aloofness in walking down his own path and staying true to his inner naivety, and he was described as ‘having a pure heart concealed in a wild vessel.’ ”
–Wang Jie, SHINE, Oct. 21, 2018

Francia’s art was a brilliant combination of feminism and Jewish identity, manifested in printmaking and her works on canvas. Her activism ranged from leadership positions with the Women’s Caucus for Art, curating a feminist show at Westbeth Gallery, and touring with a 1995 multi-media project that focused on her Jewish roots. She helped revitalize the Westbeth Printmaking Studio and co-produced the film “Growing Up at Westbeth,” which consisted of interviews with reminiscences about the 1970’s and 1980’s.

For years she ran an arts program in La Chaux-de-Fonds with her husband, percussionist Bruce Smith. She gave classes in reduction linocut printmaking and created an amazing amount of beautiful artwork which was featured widely in exhibitions and in many private collections as well as the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

Yet alongside her determination and energy, burned a fire of kindness and generosity that remained lit all her life. She was funny and bold, and could see through people in a way that always left me astonished and laughing. She was a fighter, inside and out, even when you couldn’t see it. You can see it now, in her art.

-Christina Maile, Dec 15, 2024
Photo Marianne Barcellona

“As a trained opera, oratorio and concert singer with a rich bass-baritone voice, he performed challenging roles as Scarpia, Amonasro, Papageno, Schicchi, Figaro, and Elijah, oratories of Bach and Handel, and Amahl and the Night Visitors at Alice Tully Hall. He also sang in important premier performances of Moses and Aaron and The Enchanted Pear with the Boston Opera, the Bel Canto Opera, Opera Buffa Company, and New York Lyric Opera.” As a narrator, “he was most known for his performance in Honegger’s King David that he narrated in major venues; he performed it at the Church of the Ascension on Fifth Avenue for over 25 years.”

-J. Taylor Basker, WestView News, June 3, 2020
Photo: Maggie Berkvist

“[Tureske] began working at Atelier 17 in 1946 and exhibited with the group at the Laurel Gallery in 1949 with an engraving and soft ground etching titled Floating. Unfortunately, this print and others by Tureske have not been located. In addition to Atelier 17, she studied with Hans Hofmann, spending several summers during the 1950s at his school in Provincetown. By the mid-1950s, Tureske concentrated primarily on making whimsical wire sculpture, reminiscent of Alexander Calder’s wire creations. These large sculptures were both stand-alone pieces, but also found a place in the store windows of upscale clothing stores like Bergdorf Goodman, Gunther Jaeckel, Forstmann Woolens, and also in theatrical contexts as stage settings.”

-Christina Weyl, The Women of Atelier 17, Biographical Supplement

“Susan Spector Urkowitz was an actor, director, and professor of theatre. She worked as an actor and director in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and performed with the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective and other downtown theatres. She studied acting with Uta Hagen at HB Studio before she went back to school to get her Ph.D. in Theatre History at NYU. Her dissertation was a biography of Uta Hagen, and the research archive she established on the history of Hagen and HB Studio is now part of a permanent archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. She taught speech and theatre at Baruch College, where she also directed many student productions, created a studio theatre as well as a program for using theatre across the curriculum, from 1982 until her death in 2000.”

-Rachel Urkowitz, January 2021

Remembrances attributed to Grace Paley: “A late picture—[Lucia] is standing at the corner of Bank and Bleecker, she is arguing fiercely for the life of the linden trees in the small plaza at Abingdon Square. A group of citizen mothers want to enlarge the playground. But she understands and hates the tree and plaza shortage in NY compared to Rome, Florence, Paris, all the great European cities. … Lucia believed in the artist as a movement worker. Her work for all of us could be seen in everyday leaflets (made with Sybil Claiborne most of the time) also … the posters, the woodcuts, the WRL calendars. The stunning unique panel paintings of Vietnamese women, created for the doors of the Washington Square Methodist Church, were political art at its most direct and beautiful.”

-luciaarthurernst.com/site/LV/lvFrame-3.html

“Aijiro Wakita is known for his great swathes of chrome, architectural erections of metal and monumental steel origami. ‘Among the most engaging work in this exhibition are sheets of paper which have been made from scratch. Embedded within the sheets are bits of metal, curved and rusting. The rust stains and eventually flakes off through the paper, creating a new and ever changing work in the process.’ ”

– Asia Art Archive
Photo: Tom Haar

“The Brooklyn-born Walotsky graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1966. His first job was with Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine. He later painted posters of such rock stars as Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and created album jackets for RCA and other record companies. … His fine-art paintings and book cover art, which frequently featured space aliens and surreal landscapes, have been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the U.S. Embassy in Paris.”

-Los Angeles Times, Aug. 3, 2002
Image: Spaceman by Ron Walotsky

“Bassist Peter Warren quite simply put out one of the finest albums in the JAPO catalogue: the long out-of-print Solidarity. Warren is one of a cadre of American jazz musicians who made a career for themselves in Europe, where his idiosyncratic approach was enriched and encouraged by the likes of Edward Vesala, Rolf Kühn, and Albert Mangelsdorff. In 1974, he returned to New York City, where he joined forces with Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition, appearing on the classic ECM sessions Special Edition and Tin Can Alley.”
-Tyran Grillo, “Peter Warren, Solidarity,” ecmreviews.com, Aug. 28, 2015
Photo: lastfm.com

“He arrived in the US in 1947 as a teenage survivor of Buchenwald and became an award-winning student at the Art Students League. … His luminous paintings of nudes, geishas, clowns, rabbis and ordinary people were sold at the former Park South Gallery in the Carnegie Hall building. They are part of many private collections in the US and Europe. A book of his work was published by Soho gallery-owner Louis Meisel’s Eminent Publications.”

-legacy.com

“The artist, who was born in Bremen, Germany, in 1936, was a self-taught painter who began his painting career in 1950. He lived and worked in Paris from 1955 to 1959, then Brussels, finally settling in Manhattan in 1965. … At a young age, Weichberger established an international reputation and had more than 50 one-man shows in Europe and the United States, participated in the Biennales of Tokyo and Paris, and the ‘Salon Comparaisons’ at the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris.”
–Betsey Bruner, Arizona Daily Sun, Sept. 25, 2011

Lucienne Weinberger explored the emotional connections in people with the use of color and free-form shapes. Over the years, her work developed with two prominent directions: figurative imagery where iconic figures are brought to life with a dreamlike narrative, including works on canvas and paper, and fired clay sculptures using acrylic paints and collage mounted canvas. The second body of work encompassed abstract paintings and drawings. Lucienne studied art in Paris for several years, and continued for two years painting at the Art Students League with a Merit Scholarship. In 1976 she received a MacDowell Fellowship.
-Adapted from www.luciennew.com

Author of short stories, poetry and the novel Age of Noon.

Iain Whitecross was born in the U.K. He started out in economics but came to the U.S. and got involved with Experiments in Art and Technology. He did a number of pieces in that field. “The Electronic Garden” was shown in OK Harris Gallery and the Hyde Collection in Upstate New York in 1992. Another large installation titled “The Seasons and Other Cycles of Life” was shown at “Images du Futur” during the 1998 ISEA biennial in Montreal.

In 2001 Whitecross returned to painting with “Reef Dreams” and with a close focus on the unfamiliar or the unexpected in the natural world. His many exhibitions included shows at the Atea Ring Gallery in Upstate New York, as well as the Graham Gallery in New York City, the Brooklyn Museum, Portland Museum, and Galerie du Damier in Paris. He was the recipient of fellowships from several art colonies, including MacDowell, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Millay Colony.

-Elena Borstein, July 2020

“In the late 1960’s and early 70’s, Ms. Wilke startled the art world with beautiful sculptures made of latex or ceramic whose layered and folded flowerlike forms were both abstract and yet highly suggestive of female genitalia. This fortune-cookie-like configuration became the artist’s signature; it was sometimes small and made of homey materials like chewing gum or laundry lint, or it could be larger and painted with Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes. These forms could hang on the wall, or be marshaled in great numbers across the floor, or be stuck directly to the body of the artist herself, as they were in some of her Conceptual photographic pieces.”

-Robert Smith, New York Times, Jan. 29, 1993
Photo: Metal Magazine

“Paintings by nine lesser known WPA workers who went on to establish credible careers as fine artists are currently on view [at Phantom Gallery in Los Angeles, 1986] in an excellent exhibition that stands as a bittersweet reminder of an American Dream that comes to seem increasingly remote. Portraying the working class as possessing boundless dignity and resilience, these pictures are infused with a spirit of hope that’s sadly moving in that it seems a bit quaint today. … The majority of these artists were either born or lived in New York, and their work is rooted in a distinctly urban sensibility; we see, for instance, construction workers relaxing on the girders of a high rise in Joseph Wolins’ ‘Lunch Hour.’ Painting in a muted, lyrical style evocative of Charles Sheeler, Wolins specialized in exterior scenes: industrial ports with tugboats and towers spewing steam, a chicken market, a view of an overground subway bridge on the Bowery.”

—Kristine McKenna, Los Angeles Times, Nov. 28, 1986

photo: Joseph Wolins at Westbeth, taken by his son, John Wolins 1983

“Born at the turn of the 20th century, Stefan Wolpe belonged to a generation of composers in the German cultural orbit who believed that modern art was a means of transforming both the individual and society. Wolpe was imbued with the idea that avant-garde art can serve the man on the street and the audience in the concert hall, and he dedicated himself to forming an entente between new music and the ordinary listener. He sought to incorporate elements of the vernacular and traditional musics of his successive homelands in an inclusive language. … In 1951 he affirmed in his diary: ‘The world has to get conscious of my way of making music … a thoroughly organized but proud, erect, hymnic, profoundly contained, human evocation.’ ”

—Austin Clarkson, Milken Archive of Jewish Music

“Over the course of his career, during which he exhibited in New York City, throughout the United States, and on the East End, his work drew on elements of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, which emerged in the mid to late-1960s. In many of his recent paintings, cartoon figures and Ben-Day dots of the latter movement were overlaid with swirling slashes of paint. … ‘I was between generations,’ he said. ‘I loved Pop art, so I wanted to find a way to swoosh it together with Abstract Expressionism. I was really interested in what Warhol was doing. Some of the abstract artists verbally assaulted me when Pop elements started to appear in my work.’ ”

-The East Hampton Star, Aug. 22, 2019

“The modern artist often has to be part scientist, part mystical optimist, part teacher-poet. Richard Zarro is such an artist, combining technical, physical evolutionary trends with the visionary fantasies of the ancient prophets, all reconciled in a dynamic that pushes man deep into himself and farther and farther toward that ‘otherness’ of the great saints and oriental philosophers.”

-Ree Dragonette, from an art show flyer quoted in Timeline (link above to website created by Roberta Culver, 2004)

Kathleen Zimmerman’s biography on askart.com describes her as a collage artist and painter with exhibits at the Silvermine Guild in Connecticut, the National Academy of Design, as well as shows at Westbeth Gallery, St. Mary’s College in Maryland, and American Water Color Society. She was the recipient of “numerous awards and prizes … Her work is held by: University of Wyoming Art Museum in Laramie; North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh; National Academy of Design; Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University.”
—www.askart.com/artist/Kathleen_Zimmerman

In a review of a Westbeth Gallery show, James R. Mellow wrote that “Miss Zimmerman’s collages … have a persistent authority and reveal a marked talent for the use of crisp and decisive color. Especially notable are ‘Eclipse’ and ‘Black Mesa.’ ”
-New York Times, Feb. 17, 1973

The Westbeth Graphics Studio, which opened in 1970, “began in response to the needs of the first printmakers who moved into Westbeth. Working with the then Board of Directors, printmaker Sandor Zugor found space in the I Building. Under his energetic and long-term leadership, two Charles Brand presses—an etching press and lithography press—were donated to the studio. The tall lockers—still in use—came from a passenger ship company.”

—Catalog, “Printmakers from the Westbeth Graphics Studio,” October 1-16, 2011
Photo: Tom Haar