Remembering Rafael Ferrer, Aracy Amaral, and Liang Shaoji
This week, we honor an arist and musician, one of Brazil’s first women museum directors, and a Chinese conceptualist.
In Memoriam is published every Wednesday afternoon and honors those we recently lost in the art world.
Rafael Ferrer (1933–2026)
Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist and musician
His conceptual, process-based, and narrative-driven art across sculpture, painting, printmaking, installation, and more features recurring motifs such as paper bag faces, kayaks, and maps. He was active within Surrealist circles in Paris in the 1950s, taught at institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, and New York's School of Visual Arts. He held major solo exhibitions at El Museo del Barrio, Guild Hall in East Hampton, and more, and won a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 1993 and an Annalee and Barnett Newman Foundation Grant in 2011.
Aracy Amaral (1930–2026)
Brazilian art historian and curator
She was one of the first women to lead a major museum in Brazil as director of Pinacoteca between 1975 and 1979 and the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo from 1982 to 1986, both in São Paulo. Her research centered Brazilian modernism, including overseeing Tarsila do Amaral's 2008 catalogue raisonné.
Liang Shaoji (1945–2026)
Chinese conceptual artist
He meditated on humanity's place in nature through video works and installations such as his Natural Series (1989–2026), which included miner helmets covered in silk, bamboo filled with wax, and more. He showed his work at the 1999 Venice Biennale, the 2000 and 2006 Shanghai Biennales, and more.
Richard Manoogian (1936–2026)
Collector of Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, and Mary Cassatt, and more
A chairman emeritus at Masco Corporation, the art collector also previously operated a gallery, Beacon Hill on the Upper East Side, and served as a member of the trustee council of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His collection has been shown at that museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and more.
