Bill Viola, ground-breaking video artist, dies at 73 at his Long Beach home

Pioneering video artist Bill Viola has died at his home in Long Beach at the age of 73 due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease, his studio announced on Sunday.

“It is with great sadness that Bill Viola Studio shares news of the death of Bill Viola, one of the world’s leading contemporary artists,” the studio wrote in a post on Instagram. “He passed away peacefully at home on July 12th, at the age of 73. The cause was Alzheimer’s Disease. Viola is survived by his wife and longtime creative collaborator, Kira Perov, Director of Bill Viola Studio, sons Blake and Andrei Viola and daughter-in-law Aileen Milliman.”

Viola was born in Queens, New York and graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1973. For the next several years he studied with composer David Tudor in the new music group “Rainforest,” and also served as technical director at Art/tapes/22, a pioneering video studio in Florence, Italy.

He met Perov when she invited him to show work at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, in 1977.

In 1983, he became an instructor in advanced video at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Viola received a Guggenheim Fellowship for fine arts in 1985. In 1998 he was the Getty scholar-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

His experimental work used electronic, sound and image technology in new media to explore fundamental human experiences such as birth, death and aspects of consciousness.

Viola’s pieces have been exhibited at some of the most prestigious museums in the world. His collaborators have spanned the cultural gamut from famed theater director and UCLA professor Peter Sellars to Trent Reznor of the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails.