Cox, Christopher, 1949-1990

Christopher Cox, an editor, author, actor, and producer, was born Howard Raymond Cox Jr., on August 27, 1949, in Gadsden, Alabama. He attended the University of Alabama in Birmingham for two years, and then moved to New York to pursue a career in the theatre. During the 1970s, he performed in Off-Broadway shows, wrote plays and stories, and was director of the New Play Series and the Writers Workshop at the Joseph Jefferson Theatre Company between 1974 and 1976; he also was employed briefly as a secretary to composers Virgil Thomson and Nicholas Nabokov. In the last decade of his life, Cox worked for publishing houses, primarily E.P. Dutton and Ballantine, and wrote freelance articles and reviews for newspapers and magazines. His book, A Key West Companion, was issued by St. Martin's Press in 1983, and his short study of photographer Dorothea Lange was published by Aperture in 1987. Cox was affiliated with a literary group known as the Violet Quill, whose seven members are regarded as one of the strongest collective voices of the gay male experience in the post-Stonewall era. He died in New York from AIDS-related complications on September 7, 1990.

William R. Olander was an art historian, museum curator, and critic. Born in Virginia, Minnesota, on July 14, 1950, he attended Northwestern University, and received a Ph.D. in art history from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts in 1983. Olander was appointed curator of modern art at the Allen Memorial Museum at Oberlin College in 1979 and held that position until 1984; he served as the museum's acting director in his last two years there. On January 1, 1985, he became curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Olander was senior curator at the New Museum when he died from AIDS-related complications on March 18, 1989.

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