This week’s edition of In Memoriam honors six figures who shaped American art and culture over decades, from a graphic designer whose Tumblr revived the wild early internet to a photographer who brought photography into art history. The newsletter, published every Wednesday afternoon, honors those recently lost in the art world. Here is what each person did and why they mattered.
Cat Frazier and the Raw Early Internet
Cat Frazier died in 2026. She was a graphic designer who revolted against the clean, minimalist look that dominated contemporary design. Her project AnimatedText, a Tumblr page from the 2010s, featured text-based GIFs that recreated the chaotic, colorful aesthetic of the early web. The page gained half a million followers.
Her work kickstarted an era of web aesthetics we are arguably still in, defined by pop graphics, intentionally “bad” design, and a nihilistic irony. Writer and critic Adrian Chen praised her in an interview, calling her “one of the great pop artists of the 21st-century internet culture.” He added that by reappropriating “tossed off or forgotten pop culture of an earlier age, [she] showed how you can really make these things your own.”
Khaled Al Awar and the Ojai Arts Scene
Khaled Al Awar died in 2026. He moved to the United States from Lebanon in 1970 and settled in Ojai, California. There he established Primavera Gallery, which exhibited emerging artists working across a range of media. He also owned the Ojai Playhouse Theater, a local arts landmark.
His commitment to the arts was recognized in 2017, when he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in the Arts from the city. Al Awar built a gallery that gave young artists their first opportunities, and his theater remained a central part of the community.
Walter Kershaw and British Street Art
Walter Kershaw died in 2026. He was a British muralist and street artist who began painting unsanctioned large-scale murals and planting public sculptures on underutilized urban properties in England in the 1970s and ’80s. His work attracted wide attention, and he is sometimes known as “Britain’s first street artist.”
His works are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Collection of Brazilian Art in São Paulo, and other institutions. Kershaw’s practice blurred the line between public space and art, planting sculptures in unused lots and painting walls without permission.
Susan Michod and Pattern and Decoration
Susan Michod died in 2026. She was a Pattern and Decoration painter, a movement that emphasized decorative, pattern-filled surfaces. Her works were made through acts of tearing, collaging, sponging, spattering, and adding splashes of glitter.
In 1973, she founded the Chicago women artists’ collaborative Artemisia Gallery. Michod’s painting was about surface, texture, and color, and her gallery work helped establish a network of women supporting each other.
Joel Snyder and Photography in Art History
Joel Snyder died in 2026. He was among the first scholars in the US to teach the history of photography, and he was instrumental in bringing the medium from the margins to the center of art history. His own photographs are in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Snyder studied the rise of commercial photography in the 1800s, and he urged all scholars of a medium to understand how works are made. That insistence on process and technique helped shift the field toward a more rigorous understanding of photography as a historical practice.
Timothy White Eagle and Performance Art
Timothy White Eagle died in 2026. They were a multidisciplinary and performance artist whose work is rooted in theater, ritual, and storytelling. Their performance work includes the large-scale immersive work The Indigo Room (2023).
They founded the performance art and coffeehouse venue the Coffee Messiah in Seattle in the 1990s. White Eagle collaborated with artists like photographer Adrian Chesser and actor and playwright Taylor Mac.
What We Lose When Artists Die
Each of these six people worked in a different medium and a different corner of the art world, yet they shared a common thread: they made something new happen. Here is how each one did it:
- Cat Frazier took the messy early internet and made it beautiful again.
- Khaled Al Awar built a gallery and a theater in Ojai.
- Walter Kershaw planted sculptures in empty lots.
- Susan Michod tore and collaged her way into the Pattern and Decoration movement.
- Joel Snyder brought photography into art history.
- Timothy White Eagle created immersive performance spaces.
Their deaths mark the end of individual lives, but they also mark the end of particular ways of seeing and doing. Frazier’s Tumblr aesthetic may live on, but the person who started it is gone. Al Awar’s gallery and theater in Ojai will continue, but the man who ran them is not there. Kershaw’s sculptures remain, but the artist who placed them is no longer around to explain them.
That is the strange position of remembering people through their work. We see the art, the gallery, the performance space, and we know they existed. But the person behind them is gone, and that absence is felt even in the most enduring of legacies.
We honor them by looking at what they made.
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