HOUSTON, TX.- Blaffer Art Museum joins the international art community and the family of Tony Feher in mourning the loss of a great artist and dear friend. "Tony's poignant and inimitable touch transformed materials and people in equally profound ways. I was fortunate to have worked with him and enjoyed his friendship for as long as I have," says Blaffer Art Museum Director and Chief Curator Claudia Schmuckli, who curated his 20-year survey in 2012.

Tony Feher marked a pivotal moment in the artist's career and the museum's history as it celebrated the reopening of Blaffer after an 18-month renovation. It was our profound honor to share the beauty and power of Tony's seemingly fragile, yet tenacious work with our Houston community and with audiences in Iowa, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio, where his retrospective traveled to great critical acclaim, celebrated by Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee, the New York Times's Holland Cotter and Artforum's Wayne Koestenbaum.

In the years after his survey, Tony continued to maintain strong ties with the museum and Houston, exhibiting with Hiram Butler Gallery and developing a major commission for the University of Houston's public art collection. He was a much-beloved fixture at the museum, returning many times long after his exhibition had closed, manning the front desk, visiting with staff and visitors, filling the galleries with laughs and scowls as big and generous as his personality. We will miss Tony's presence in our lives but celebrate his vision and influence, which live on.

Tony Feher was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1956, and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, with early stops in Florida and Virginia. He received a BA from The University of Texas, and resided in New York City. Feher had a long history with Sikkema Jenkins & Co., presenting his first solo exhibition in New York at the gallery – then called Wooster Gardens – in 1993. He went on to exhibit his work widely in over 40 solo exhibitions and numerous group shows. In 2012, an in-depth retrospective organized by Claudia Schmuckli premiered at the Des Moines Art Center before traveling to the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston; the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; and Akron Art Museum. His work can be found in important international public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.