PASSINGS: Patrick Merrill

Patrick Merrill, 61, a mixed-media artist and printmaker who was curator of Cal Poly Pomona’s art gallery from 1997 to 2009, died Tuesday in Diamond Bar after battling colon cancer, the university announced.

Merrill had a studio in Covina where he made etchings, woodcuts, collographs and monoprints. Besides directing and curating the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery at Cal Poly Pomona, he also was publicity and exhibition director for the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art from 1990 to 2000.

He was on the founding board of the T.H. Pendergast California Parole Museum in Diamond Bar and from 2001 until this year curated exhibitions about the history of the state’s parole system.

Merrill was born in Toronto on Dec. 6, 1948, and moved with his family to California in 1958. He served in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War and earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Cal State Long Beach and a master’s of fine arts from Cal State Fullerton.

According to art historian Debra Winters, whom he married in 1996, Merrill dealt in his work with “psychology and politics, and often developed the intersection between the two.”

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