Brent Fay Sikkema (August 13, 1948 – January 15, 2024) was an American art dealer. He was the co-founder of Sikkema Jenkins & Co, a
Manhattan
Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...
art gallery that represents artists including
Kara Walker,
Louis Fratino
Louis Fratino (born 1993) is an American visual artist.
Education
Fratino graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2015. Fratino was a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting, Berlin, 2015–2016 ...
,
Arturo Herrera, the estate of
Tony Feher
Tony Feher (March 2, 1956 – June 24, 2016) was an American sculptor. He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and was raised in Corpus Christi, Texas. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin, in 1978. He began exhib ...
,
Vik Muniz
Vik Muniz (; born 1961) is a Brazilian artist and photographer. Initially a sculptor, Muniz grew interested with the photographic representations of his work, eventually focusing completely on photography. Primarily working with unconventional ma ...
, and
Jeffrey Gibson
Jeffrey A. Gibson (born 1972)''U.S. Public Records Index'' Vol. 2 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.), 2010. is an American Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee painter, and sculptor. He has lived and worked in Brooklyn; Hudson, New York; and Ge ...
.
Early life
Sikkema was born on August 13, 1948, in Morrison, Illinois, the younger of two children of Dwaine Louis Sikkema and Emily "Billie" (Howe) Sikkema.
He attended the
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...
.
Career
Sikkema began working with art in 1971 and opened his first gallery in 1976, in the city of
Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He was a partner in the art gallery Sikkema Jenkins & Co, which is located in the
Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. The place was founded in 1991 by him under the name Wooster Gardens.
Death
Sikkema died on January 15, 2024, at the age of 75, after he was stabbed to death in his
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the state of the same name, Brazil's third-most populous state, and the second-most populous city in Brazil, after São Paulo. Listed by the GaWC as a b ...
townhouse. Two days later, 30-year-old Alejandro Triana Tevez was arrested as a suspect.
Sikkema sustained eighteen stab wounds, most of them to the face and chest, and $3,000 was stolen from his home.
References
1948 births
2024 deaths
American art dealers
Deaths by stabbing in Brazil
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