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It is with great sadness that we announce that Edward A. Stasack passed away in Prescott, Arizona on January 26, 2023. His inspiring accomplishments are to be celebrated. Born in Chicago in 1929, he was educated in the public schools of his native city and spent summers in the workshop of his father, a wood sculptor and furniture designer. Following a stint in the US Army, Ed received a BFA in art with high honors at the University of Illinois, Urbana in 1955 and, with a fellowship, attained an MFA in 1956. That year he joined the faculty of the University of Hawai'i where he taught painting, printmaking, and drawing until retirement as an emeritus professor in 1988. From 1969 to 1972 he was chair of the Department of Art.Stasack developed a personal variation of abstract expressionism. In his early work, he sought to fuse the specificity of conventional figure painting with the freedom and invention of abstraction. He was one of the pioneers of the collograph, an important new printmaking technique developed in the 1950s. It is a variation of the principles of collage where the plates are distinguished by the use of collo or glue and applied elements. His prints have been shown in Argentina, Canada, England, France, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. He had over 50 solo exhibitions throughout the US and abroad, including, in 1967, in Bucharest, Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir. Other major solo exhibitions occurred at the Honolulu Academy of Arts (now Honolulu Museum of Art) in 1961, 1966, 1969, 1976, and 1987. Until the death of Edith Halpert in 1972, he maintained a long-time association with her Downtown Gallery in New York City.
Stasack has work in over 75 public collections in the US, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York Public Library, Brooklyn Museum, Library of Congress, Newark Public Library, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ed Stasack was a true renaissance man. His interests were broad and based on intellectual rigor. With support from Tiffany Foundation Fellowships in 1958 and 1962 he began studies of Hawaiian petroglyphs that led to J. Halley Cox asking him to co-author the book "Hawaiian Petroglyphs" published in 1970. A Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1959 permitted him to investigate the absence of anthropomorphic imagery in the art of Fiji and Samoa. Another in 1975 along with Hawai'i State and US Bicentennial Commissions Fellowships allowed him to work on a series of prints and paintings on the theme of Captain Cook.
Following retirement, Stasack continued investigations of rock art in Hawai'i and the southwestern US. Internationally recognized as an authority in the field, he received numerous contracts and grants from corporations, the National Park Service, National Forest Service, and the Hawai'i Community Foundation to record sites. Georgia Lee and he co-authored "Spirit of Place: The Petroglyphs of Hawai'i" in 1999. Stasack was a recipient of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award for art and the Crabtree Award from the Society of American Archaeology. He greatly appreciated the integrity of petroglyphs and firmly believed that some reach the level of fine art in esthetics and depth of content, thus deserving as much respect as the finest of arts.
Always one to thank others, in 2002, Ed Stasack reminisced, "Although unaware of it at the time, my life was permanently changed for the better when I was hired to teach at the University of Hawai'i—changed mostly by just being in Hawai'i. For me, the impact of Hawaiian culture was palpable. I will always be grateful to the faculty and students of the Department of Art, and to friends and non-art colleagues for the experiences, adventures, memories, and those years of collegiality."
Ed is survived by his wife and fellow researcher Diane; by daughters Caren Prentice and Jennifer Stasack Savage; sons John and Michael Stasack; stepson David Hirsch; grandchildren: Alyce Ching, Natalie Johnson, Joseph and Henry Prentice, Via Savage, Dylan and Carly Stasack, and Larissa Hirsch; great-grandchildren: Everly and Isla Ching, Rowan and Crew Johnson, and Mason and Alec Moses; and all whom he held dear to his heart.
We miss him dearly.
In Celebration of a full,
well-lived life, and on behalf of the Stasack family,
this tribute was composed by Ed's student and dear friend, Tom Klobe.
