Art historian and artist, curator and collector, gymnast, actor and activist David Kunzle, died January 1 at 87. Through his teaching at UCLA and his prodigious writings, the pioneer comicologist  opened the doors of art history for the once-disdained topics of cartoons, comics and political posters.

English-born and Cambridge-­educated, he earned a ­Gombrich-guided University of London Ph.D., for printed picture stories through 1825, which laid the groundwork for his seminal three-volume comic strip history (1973–2021). Those studies—showing comics “… as part of a long history of contentious political art”—shaped the nascent field of Comics Studies, says CSUN Professor Charles Hatfield in his Kunzle remembrance (see tjc.com).

In writing, editing and/or translating 24 volumes plus 150 art-historical essays, he reflected in his work a “soft Marxism,” ­focused on artists and workers in resistance or revolution—political and aesthetic, formal and popular. His oeuvre spanned the globe and five centuries, from early modern Dutch painting to 19th-century graphics, Victorian clothing and fetishism, to 20th-century protest posters, Nicaraguan murals, Disney ducks and images of Che ­Guevara as revolutionary Jesus.

An art history professor at UC Santa Barbara beginning in 1965, he was fired after eight years for antiwar protests, just as the first volume of his comics history appeared in print. He sued for wrongful dismissal, teaching meanwhile at CalArts, where he linked with poet/activist Deena Metzger, a fellow poster collector. After their poster exhibitions in Cuba and Chile, he met exiled Chilean writer Ariel Dorman, whose Para leer al Pato Donald unveiled animated capitalism and imperialist ideology, and Kunzle translated as How to Read Donald Duck.

In 1977 he won his UCSB case, but rather than returning, he joined UCLA, teaching 19th-century art and a two-part course on “Responses to Imperialism”—in the US during the Vietnam War and in Latin America. Protest posters he amassed became the core of Center for the Study of Political Graphics’ immense collection. Gathering Guevara imagery worldwide throughout decades, he ­curated them for a 1997 museum exhibition, then ­theorized them in Chesucristo: The Fusion in Image and Word of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ (2016). Post-retirement, he completed several books on 19th-century European cartoonists.  —John Seeley

Two long-time members of the faculty at the USC Roski School of Art and Design passed away in 2023.

Jay Willis taught in the USC sculpture program from 1969 until 2010. He took a hiatus from sculpture while he founded and built the Public Art Studies Program, which began in 1990 as the first of its kind at US universities. Willis’ original intention for the Masters-level program was to bring practicing ­artists together with architects and urban planners. He quickly recognized the interest in the program among curators and arts administrators, and so modified its focus, laying the foundation for its current form as the MA in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere.

A sculptor almost his entire life, Willis worked in several media and exhibited widely in university venues and galleries, especially Cirrus Gallery. His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, and other private and public collections. Outside of art, Willis was an avid marathon runner, and fervent fan of Trojan football and the Dodgers.

Margit Omar taught for nearly 40 years at USC in the painting and drawing department. She was best known for her large, highly textured, intensely colored abstract paintings, for which she won the Young Talent Award at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work is in the LACMA collection as well as that of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. ­German by birth, in later life Omar developed an interest in graffiti ­produced in divided, Cold War Berlin.

Both Omar and Willis are remembered by their colleagues and friends as excellent teachers, warm individuals and good storytellers. Both influenced scores of students with their approach to art, art making, appreciation of materials, and the richness of their creative lives.  —Margaret Lazzari