Remembering Betelhem Makonnen, Betye Saar, and Keith A. Morrison
This week, we honor an explorer of diasporic consciousness, a revolutionary assemblage artist, and the first Black dean of art in the US.
In Memoriam is published every Wednesday afternoon and honors those we recently lost in the art world.
Betelhem Makonnen (1972–2026)
Artist who explored diasporic consciousness
Through photography, video, public art, and installations, she explored diasporic consciousness, embedded memory, and contemporary experience. In the 2019 video work “change means revolution in Amharic (person, place and thing),” for instance, she wanders through trees wearing a mask of herself as a child. "On her own now," Billie Anania wrote in a review in this magazine that same year, "the artist hides behind her former self, occasionally lifting the mask to face the world with caution."
Makonnen's work has been shown at the Contemporary Austin, Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Blanton Museum, and more. She was on faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, co-organized the Ethiopian video art platform Addis Video Art Festival, and co-founded the Austin, Texas-based art collective Black Mountain Project.
"I am finding ways to actively align my practice to support and participate in the abolitionist movements of our times," Makonnen wrote in a 2020 edition of Hyperallergic's A View From the Easel column. "Our times are in our hands. Work, rest, repeat."
Betye Saar (1926–2026)
Assemblage artist who opened portals between worlds
She trawled the archive of Americana and transmuted its most vile depictions of Blackness into mystical, visionary, and revolutionary assemblages. Her 1972 work “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima," for which she placed a racist caricature within a shadowbox and equipped her with a gun and a hand grenade, launched the Black Women's Movement, according to Angela Davis.
Jenny Birchall (1948–2026)
British painter of whimsical beach scenes
She made whimsical paintings on wood centered on the shores of Cornwall, England, intermixing rock stars, gay icons, other artists, and other figures in cheery compositions.
Richard Edgcumbe (1951–2026)
British scholar of European metalwork and curator
As a scholar, his 1990 book The Art of the Gold Chaser in Eighteenth-Century London remains foundational in the field. As curator and museum worker, he worked his way up from assistant curator at the Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery to registrar at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff to assistant keeper of Metalwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. There, his final and most significant acquisition was a sapphire-and-diamond coronet designed by Prince Albert for Queen Victoria in 1840.
Joseph A. Helman (1937–2026)
Gallerist and dealer
He opened his namesake gallery in St. Louis in 1968, showcasing artists like Richard Serra, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella, as well as staging one of Allan Kaprow's Happenings. He partnered with Irving Blum to form powerhouse gallery Blum Helman in 1973, retiring in 1995.
Keith A. Morrison (1942–2026)
Painter, printmaker, educator, and critic
His watercolor, oil, and acrylic paintings and prints were inspired by his Afro-Caribbean heritage and Jamaican landscapes, and are held in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and more. He was a dean and professor of painting emeritus at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University as well as a curator, critic, and more; prior to that, he became the first Black academic dean of art within a predominantly White art school in the United States in 1993, when he joined the San Francisco Art Institute.
Guy Tudor (1934–2026)
Conservationist and wildlife illustrator
With a pen and brush, he illustrated thousands of birds in books like A Guide to the Birds of Colombia (1986), A Guide to the Birds of Venezuela (1978), and Field Guide to the Songbirds of South America (2009), many of which became monumental and influential works. In 1990, he received a MacArthur Award for his work as an illustrator and conservationist.
Martie Wing Young (1930–2026)
Scholar of Asian art and curator
A scholar of Asian art, he was a member of Cornell University's faculty from 1959 through 1998. He was a key figure in the creation of the university's Johnson Museum of Art, including the commissioning of I. M. Pei as its architect, and served as its interim director in the early 1990s.
