P·P·O·W is deeply saddened to announce that Anton van Dalen, influential artist and dear friend, passed away peacefully in his sleep from natural causes surrounded by his family, in his beloved home in the East Village, on June 25th.
Van Dalen was born in Amstelveen, Holland in 1938 to a conservative Calvinist family during World War II. He began rearing pigeons at the age of 12, seeking solace in the companionship of a community outside the instability around him. Enraptured by the magic of their flight, van Dalen saw his own migration journey, from Holland to Canada and ultimately to the United States, reflected in the migratory nature of the birds.
After arriving in New York’s Lower East Side in 1966, before ultimately settling in the East Village, van Dalen served as witness, storyteller, and documentarian of the dramatic cultural shifts in the neighborhood. While active in the alternative art scene in the East Village during the 1980s, van Dalen began his career as a graphic designer. Working as a studio assistant to Saul Steinberg for over 30 years, van Dalen learned the stylization and design aesthetics that would ultimately ground the visual language he used to discuss the culture around him.
Van Dalen became known for his Night Street Drawings (1975–77), a monochrome series of graphite drawings documenting the surrounding Lower East Side with tenderness and empathy, including vignettes of car wrecks, sex workers, crumbling buildings, and more. From this body of work, he developed his iconic Avenue A Cut-Out Theatre, a performance piece he first staged in 1995 charting the gentrification of the East Village through a rotating selection of miniature cut-outs, stencils and props. As poet and critic John Yau wrote, all of van Dalen’s work arose “out of a meticulous draftsmanship in service of an idiosyncratic imagination merged with civic-mindedness.”[1]
Not only an artist, but also a public servant, van Dalen said, “I try to sort of make art, and thinking and looking at art, something that we all naturally do and can figure out in our own way. There is no one interpretation—there are many. And that’s what is wonderful about art. It’s not a biased single place. You can always kind of find yourself within it.”
We are grateful for the chance to work so closely with Anton van Dalen and we will continue to support his legacy.
Van Dalen is survived by his older brother, Leen van Dalen; his two children, Marinda and Jason; their spouses, René van Haaften and Ali Villagra; and three grandchildren Cleo, Aster, and Diego.
Memorial service announcements will be forthcoming.
Van Dalen presented solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA; and EXIT Art, New York, NY, among others. His work is in the permanent collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, MA; New Museum, New York, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Artists Space, New York, NY; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada, among others. Anton: Circling Home, a documentary by Morgan Schmidt-Feng, Dennis Mohr, Katy Swailes and Will Nold, premiered in 2020 and was named DOC LA’s Best Documentary Portrait.
[1] Yau, John. “Not An Artist But A Public Servant.” Anton van Dalen: Community of Many, Black Dog Press, 2022, p. 10.
