Bruce D. Kurtz (–2003)

[excerpted from Los Angeles Times online obituary]
He began his career in 1966 as an artist who took inspiration from Andy Warhol's work. Kurtz made geometric floor sculptures of laminated Formica -- an inspired choice of material that infused the industrial forms then emerging in Minimalist abstraction with the glamorous yet domestic aura of Pop art.

It was as a critic, however, that Kurtz became widely known. He wrote for numerous publications, especially Arts Magazine and Art in America, where his subjects included such younger artists as Robert Smithson, Nam June Paik, Richard Serra and Peter Campus. He also conducted the first published interview with Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, the Italian collector of American avant-garde art, which appeared in Arts Magazine in 1972. The article discussed Panza's extensive holdings of landmark works by Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg and others, which later formed the basis of the permanent collection at Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art.

A native of Bozeman, Mont., Kurtz received a bachelor's degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1964 and two master's degrees from the University of Iowa in 1966.

He taught art and art history at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., from 1969 to 1985. That year he left academe to enter the museum world, assuming his position in Phoenix.

In 1992, Kurtz was guest curator for the annual invitational show at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. He also inaugurated the Phoenix Triennial, a survey of contemporary art from Southern California and the Southwest. Perhaps the most widely known traveling exhibition Kurtz organized was 1992's “Haring-Warhol-Disney,” which traced the legacy of mass-media cartoon imagery from Walt Disney in the 1930s through Andy Warhol in the 1960s and on to Keith Haring, a leading graffiti and post-Pop artist of the 1980s.

Kurtz was also the author of two college textbooks for Prentice Hall: Visual Imagination: An Introduction to Art and Contemporary Art: 1965-1990, the first of its kind to incorporate a large number of Los Angeles artists into the narrative of postwar art.

Kurtz left Phoenix in 1994 and moved to Paris, where he had taught American students in the 1970s under the auspices of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He returned to Phoenix last summer.