Obituaries - Art World - includes multiple articles - Obituary

Art in America, March, 2002 by Stephanie Cash, David Ebony

Samuel Mockbee, 57, innovative, socially minded architect, died of leukemia on Dec. 30 in Jackson, Miss. A native Mississippian, he received his bachelor's degree in architecture from Auburn University in Alabama, in 1974. He worked independently before forming a partnership with Coleman Coker in 1984. The pair quickly earned respect for their unique style of modernist-inspired architecture incorporating traditional Southern elements such as porches. Mockbee soon tired of the business of architecture and began teaching at Auburn in 1991; he also took up painting. Two years later, he co-founded, with D.K. Ruth, the Rural Studio student workshop in Greensboro, Ala., which is affiliated with Auburn. The workshop provided students with hands-on training, and created custom-designed homes and community buildings for the rural poor in the area. The unconventional structures often used recycled materials such as tires, hay bales, license plates and colored bottles. Mockbee was the first recipient of the National Building Museum's Apgar Award for Excellence in 1998. In 2000, he received a MacArthur Foundation grant and a National Design Award from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. He received a Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2001.

Gyorgy Kepes, 95, designer, photographer, painter, writer and founder of M.I.T.'s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, died on Dec. 29 in Cambridge, Mass. Born in Selyp, Hungary, Kepes (pronounced KEP-esh) studied at the School of Arts in Budapest. In 1930 he moved to Berlin, where he worked with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy on film and stage projects. In 1937, Moholy-Nagy invited Kepes to teach in Chicago at the school he had founded a year earlier, the New Bauhaus, which was later renamed the Chicago Institute of Design. In 1945, Kepes relocated to Massachusetts to teach at M.I.T.'s School of Architecture and Planning, and began a long relationship with the institution.

In 1967 he established the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, which explores the confluences of art and science. In all of his endeavors at the school, Kepes embraced a utopian vision of the future, which he describes in his voluminous writings. He worked closely with many artists and scientists, including Otto Piene, Jack Burnham, Harold Edgerton and Takis, examining new technologies and materials. In 1969 the center was chosen to represent the U.S. at the Sao Paulo Bienal in Brazil. Kepes remained director of the center until the late 1970s.

Throughout his career, Kepes pursued his own art-making activities, producing a large body of photographic works and paintings. In 1984 a retrospective of photos was held at New York's International Center of Photography. He showed his paintings regularly at the Alpha Gallery in Boston; they are included in numerous public collections throughout the U.S., such as the Hirshhorn, the Albright-Knox, MOMA and the Whitney.

Among his best-known books is The Language of Vision, a treatise on theories of art and science, which has rarely gone out of print since it first appeared in 1944. In 1956 he published The New Landscape in Art and Science, in which he first presented the principles that would become the basis for the Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

Richard Brown Baker, 89, collector and patron of contemporary art, died at his home in Shelburne, Vt., on Jan. 22. Baker was born into a prominent Rhode Island family but showed little interest in his father's law practice. Inspired as a teenager by family visits to London and Paris, Baker early on developed a keen interest in art although, as a student at Yale (class of 1935), he majored in English literature. After graduation, he served as the private secretary to the U.S. ambassador to Spain. During the war, he returned to Washington to work for the Office of Strategic Services and later, the C.I.A.

After returning to New York in 1950, he renewed his passion for art. He attended lectures at the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Students' League, and studied with Hans Hofmann. He began collecting in the mid 1950s and focused on modern and cutting-edge contemporary works. He bought Franz Kline's Wannamaker Block (1955) for $2,000 and Pollock's Arabesque (1948) for $2,500. Among his many other notable early acquisitions was Lichtenstein's 1962 Blam!, which he snapped up for $1,000. By the mid '90s, Baker had amassed more than 1,600 works, and over the years frequently lent key pieces for museum exhibitions around the world. In 1995 he gave Yale 14 major pieces, valued at more than $25 million. In his will, he left the university three quarters of his remaining collection; the other quarter will go to the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Catherine Voorsanger, 51, Metropolitan Museum curator, died Dec. 24 in New York of melanoma. She had worked at the Met since 1983 as an associate curator of American decorative arts, specializing in 19th- and early 20th-century furniture. Among her published works is the Dictionary of Architects, Artisans, Artists and Manufacturers, which was included in the catalogue for the 1987 exhibition "In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement." Last year she co-organized, with John K. Howat, the exhibition "Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861."