Richard Nonas

Post-Minimalist sculptor Richard Nonas died Tuesday, at the age of eighty-five. 

Initially trained as an anthropologist, Nonas discovered sculpture accidentally, while walking in the park and picking up some wood to throw for his dog to fetch. He crossed two sticks, one in each hand, and realized that there might be infinite ways of doing this and therefore infinite ways to create infinite forms and infinite spaces. 

He discovered that the variations conveyed “strong and specific emotion” and took the pieces home to play around with. “A couple of months later,” Nonas would recall, “a friend came to my apartment and said, ‘Idiot, that’s called art.’”

Prior to this, Nonas studied literature and social anthropology and spent nearly a decade conducting field work among Native American populations in Northern Ontario and the Yukon in Canada, as well as in Mexico, and the American Southwest. 

Nonas became involved with the groundbreaking SoHo artist-run gallery 112 Greene Street, alongside contemporaries including Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Serra, Alan Saret, Tina Girouard, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein and Larry Miller. 

His gallery, Fergus McCaffrey, which announced the news, did not indicate a cause of death.