In Memoriam
Professor Emeritus
David Antin, a poet, critic and performance artist of lasting importance, passed away on October 11, 2016. He was 84. His background included undergraduate work in science and languages with graduate work in linguistics at New York University (special project was the language structure of Gertrude Stein). He edited and translated several science and math books and pursued a career as a poet since...
Professor Emeritus
Harold Cohen, died at age 87 on April 27 2016, studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, and taught there for several years before joining the Visual Arts Department in 1968. His work as a painter has been exhibited widely both in galleries and in major museums. During the 'sixties he represented Great Britain in the Venice Biennale, Documenta 3, the Paris Biennale, the...
Professor Emeritus
Professor Emeritus Manny Faber who served on the full-time faculty from 1970 to 1987, died August 18, 2008, at his home in Leucadia, California. He was 91. Artist Manny Farber pursued dual careers as a film critic and painter since 1941. Farber served as the film critic for The New Republic, The Nation, Time Magazine, The New Leader, Cavalier, and Artforum before joining the Visual Arts...
Professor Emeritus
Professor Emeritus Allan Kaprow who served on the full-time faculty from 1974 to 1993, died April 5, 2006, at his home in Encinitas, California. He was 78 and died of natural causes. A memorial celebration was held on Saturday, June 3, 2006, from 3-6pm in the Visual Arts Facility at the University of California, San Diego. Allan Kaprow studied at New York University (art at the undergraduate...
Professor Emeritus
Standish Lawder died on June 21, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. Standish Lawder attended Williams College and the National Autonomous University of Mexico as an undergraduate, studied at the University of Munich, and received his PhD in art history from Yale University where his thesis dealt with relationships between modern art and film during the teens and 20's. He has also written on...
Professors Emeriti
The Harrisons collaborated as artists since the early seventies. Since the mid-eighties a large part of their work was done in Europe and they completed a book on the future of the European landscape entitled Grüne Landschaften, Vision: Die Welt als Garten. They were associated with Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York City since 1974...
Professor
Italo Scanga, a world-renowned artist and art professor in the Visual Arts Department died July 27, 2001 in his Pacific Beach studio of heart failure. He was 69 years old. Scanga, a native of Calabria, Italy, was celebrated throughout the art world for his ebullient constructions and his fluency across the spectrum of art media. His creations in sculpture, painting, printmaking, glass and...
Professor Emeritus
Painter and sculptor Ernest Silva died on February 24, 2014. He was 65. Silva joined the faculty in 1979 and retired in July of 2013. Silva joined the faculty of the Visual Arts Department in 1979. Silva studied at the University of Rhode Island where he received a BFA and obtained an MFA from Tyler School of Art of Temple University in 1974. Within the Department he taught painting, drawing,...
Professor Emerita
Susan Smith joined the Department in the Fall of 1987 after having taught here as a visitor on several occasions. She received her BA from Swarthmore College, where she studied history and philosophy, did graduate work in Medieval Studies at Yale University, and received her PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. Her book The Power of Women...
Professor Emeritus
Professor Emeritus Phel Steinmetz who served on the full-time faculty from 1971 to 2011, died on October 30, 2013 at 69 from natural causes. He was regarded as one of the pioneers of conceptual art in California. Steinmetz studied photography for a number of years including study with Ansel Adams and Bennett Meyers and was a freelance photographer before joining the faculty here in 1971. His work...
Professor Emerita
A writer celebrated for bridging non-fiction and cultural analysis and making prose come alive with visual and sensory detail, Lesley Stern’s reputation was first established through her foundational contributions to film theory and history over more than four decades, during which she forged a distinctively experimental approach to writing in its relationship to film criticism and theory...
Associate Professor
Professor Mary Vidal who served on the full-time faculty from 1997 to 2007, died July 6, 2007, in Berkeley, California. A small memorial gathering was held on August 12, 2007. Mary Vidal was an art historian whose teaching and writing focused on the early modern period in Europe from the late sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries with an emphasis on the art and culture of eighteenth-century...