Yervant Gianikian, Valerie Brathwaite, Jerry Moriarty: a week of three quiet departures

Yervant Gianikian, the Italian-Armenian experimentalist whose patient re-photography of early silent film gave the 20th century back its marginalised frames, died this week at his home in Rome, according to an obituary published by Hyperallergic on 8 July 2026. He was 83. The news arrived bundled with two other departures: Valerie Brathwaite, the British sculptor whose hand-finished porcelain and bronze plants reimagined Kew Gardens as a site of quiet rebellion, and Jerry Moriarty, the Brooklyn cartoonist who spent half a century drawing the perpetual childhood of Jack Survives! and called himself, without embarrassment, a "paintoonist." Three artists. Three continents. Three different ways of insisting that slowness was a creative method, not a failure of speed.

The cluster is a reminder that the obituary pages are not only a register of fame. They are a record of which kinds of attention the culture has decided to reward — and which it merely tolerated. Gianikian spent his career working with footage that the mainstream archive had decided was not worth preserving. Brathwaite built botanical specimens that took hundreds of hours each, in a market that prizes reproducibility. Moriarty drew a comic that ran for decades in a niche Manhattan weekly and never made a serious claim on the wider audience. None of them chased scale. The thread that ties them is refusal — a refusal to pretend that fast, scaled, networked production is the only legitimate form.

Re-photographing the colonial frame

Gianikian's practice, developed with his partner and collaborator Angela Ricci Lucchi until her death in 2011, was the inverse of the restoration industry that dominates classical-film culture. Rather than clean, colour-correct, and re-master the surviving reels of Europe's silent era, the pair re-photographed them frame by frame, slowed them, tinted them, and in many cases revealed material that the original editors had cut. The approach grew out of an Italian avant-garde tradition that treated celluloid as a chemical substance first and a story second. Hyperallergic's obituary frames the work as part of a wider European reckoning with the colonial unconscious embedded in early newsreels and ethnographic footage — footage shot in Africa, the Levant, and the Caucasus by camera operators who treated their subjects as specimens.

That framing matters because it places Gianikian inside a politics of the archive, not merely inside an aesthetics of the print. The films the pair produced — From the Pole to the Equator, Notes on a European City, Pays Barbare — were not documentaries about empire. They were interventions in the moving image itself, asking what it means for a European audience in 2026 to watch footage shot by colonial operators in 1906, and to watch it slowly. The technique has aged well. As broadcasters and museums digitise their holdings at scale, the question of what is preserved, and at what speed, has become a first-order editorial decision. Gianikian's method was to refuse the speed entirely.

A sculptor who would not delegate

Brathwaite's biography, as Hyperalletic sketches it, is a study in deliberate smallness. Trained at the Royal College of Art, she turned away from the conceptual mainstream of 1980s London and spent decades making botanically accurate sculptures of plants — palm inflorescences, banana leaves, epiphytes — that looked at first glance like botanical illustration made three-dimensional and then, on longer looking, like something stranger. The pieces were hand-painted porcelain, cast bronze, and resin; the labour was her own. She refused, by her own account, to delegate the final finishing to studio assistants, on the grounds that the gesture of the hand was the work.

This is not the way contemporary sculpture economies usually function. The post-YBA British market, and the international fairs that grew out of it, reward artists who design and outsource, with fabricators in China or Eastern Europe turning drawings into large objects at industrial tolerance. Brathwaite's insistence on single-author finish reads, in that context, as a quiet protest — not against machinery, but against the way machinery is used to separate the artist's name from the artist's hand. Her death this week closes a chapter in British sculpture that never quite made it into the dominant narrative about her generation, and the obituary page is where it gets its brief, posthumous correction.

The slow cartoonist of Avenue A

Moriarty was, by his own description, a "paintoonist" — a hybrid who painted panels and let them read as drawings. Jack Survives!, his ongoing strip, has been running in the Manhattan weekly New York Press and, more recently, on its own dedicated site, since the late 1970s. The protagonist is a child who never quite ages; the violence is constant, the sentimentality is constant, and the two coexist in a register that mainstream American comics have never known what to do with. Hyperallergic's note places Moriarty inside the underground tradition that included Spiegelman, Crumb, and the early RAW stable, but distinguishes him by his refusal to graduate. He did not become an art-comics celebrity. He did not move into graphic novels. He kept drawing the strip.

There is a generational question here, beyond the obituary. American alternative comics spent the 1990s and 2000s institutionalising themselves — graphic novels in libraries, memoirs in the bestseller lists, anthology series at the big publishers. Moriarty declined the institutional arc. He worked in a small format, for a small audience, in a Manhattan that is no longer quite the Manhattan he drew. The cultural economy now rewards serialised IP and cross-platform adaptation. His strip was none of those things. It is worth pausing on a career that, by the metrics of reach, was a failure — and that, by the metrics of the form, was an argument.

What remains uncertain

The Hyperallergic tribute bundles the three deaths into a single editorial unit, which is itself a curatorial choice. Each artist made work that resists such bundling. Gianikian's films are about the violence of colonial representation; Brathwaite's plants are about the violence of botanical extraction; Moriarty's strip is about the violence of growing up American. The connecting tissue is the editorial decision to gather them in the same week and to honour all three in the same paragraph. It is a defensible decision, and it is also a narrowing one: each of these careers deserves a longer, slower read than an aggregate can provide.

The sources do not specify causes of death for any of the three, nor do they specify where Brathwaite's and Moriarty's estates plan to deposit their archives. For Gianikian, the Cineteca di Bologna and the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin have historically held his and Ricci Lucchi's materials; whether the surviving estate will consolidate there or distribute the holdings is, as of this writing, an open question. For Brathwaite, the Royal College of Art and the V&A both hold related material, but a full archival accounting has not been published. Moriarty's strip pages have, by his own account, been kept in his studio for the duration of its run; their disposition will tell us something about how seriously the alternative-comics canon takes its own margins.

The three deaths, taken together, do not amount to a thesis about the state of contemporary art. They amount to a reminder that the obituary page is one of the few places where the culture is forced to decide, in writing, what it took seriously and why. Gianikian, Brathwaite, and Moriarty each worked in a register that the dominant institutions have found difficult to metabolise. The institutional response — the retrospectives, the catalogues, the museum acquisitions — will be the real measure of whether that difficulty was respected or simply absorbed.

This publication has framed the three deaths as a single editorial unit because Hyperallergic, the sourcing outlet, did so first; we have resisted the temptation to impose a unified aesthetic theory on three careers that, on the evidence, are connected mainly by refusal.