Don Celender, Art Professor and Artist, 73

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Don Celender, an art professor and quirky Conceptual artist whose
projects involved taking polls, and who lived in St. Paul, Minnesota,
died on March 3, 2005, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the age of 73.

The cause was cancer, said Ivan C. Karp of the OK Harris Gallery in
SoHo, his longtime representative.

Mr. Celender, who was born in Pittsburgh in 1931, earned a bachelor of
fine art degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 1956 and a Ph.D. in
art history from the University of Pittsburgh in 1963. After working
briefly in the department of education at the National Gallery of Art
in Washington DC, he taught at Macalester College in St. Paul until he
learned of his illness in January.

In 1969, with Conceptual Art gaining steam, Mr. Celender began a series
of letter-writing campaigns that spoofed the movement while spreading
its ideas and gathering interesting information. With his Cultural Art
Movement he sent outlandish proposals to 25 museum directors,
suggesting for example that Sherman Lee, director of the Cleveland
Museum of Art, drop by parachute 1,000 works of Asian art from the
museum's collection, one at a time, onto the state of Alabama. Mr. Lee
replied that since art was in the mind of the beholder, he had
"mentally performed" Mr. Celender's idea.

In subsequent works, Mr. Celender surveyed film directors, prison
wardens, labor leaderss, religious figures, travel agents, celebrities
and famous chefs about their art preferences. He also produced a series
of baseball cards using artists' faces.

Mr. Celender's work was included in many books and exhibitions
surveying Conceptual Art. On a nearly annual basis, he tacked the
responses to his surveys to the walls of Mr. Karp's gallery, mounting
29 exhibitions from 1970 to 2004.

He is survived by his daughter, Catherine; and two sisters, Norma
DePrimio and Teresa D'Amico, and two brothers, James and Joseph, all of
the Pittsburgh area.

NY Times