Guy K. Nouri ’76

Guy died May 30, 2025 peacefully at home in Hudson, New York in the company of his family. The cause of death was cancer. Guy was an artist and technology professional.

Born and raised in Alpine, New Jersey, Guy attended The Buckley School in Manhattan followed by St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, where he graduated in 1970. He spent his summers at his family’s home in Amagansett and said his first understanding of light in painting came from his time there. After high school graduation, Guy took a gap year in Los Angeles before matriculating at college. At Princeton, he majored in art history.

Carol-Ann Braun remembered, “I met Guy Nouri at Princeton when he was back from a gap year or two in Los Angeles, where he had begun merging painting and street culture. He didn’t have a studio at 185 Nassau, as most of us did during our Junior and Senior years in the Visual Arts Program of the Art History Department. But he was close to Diane Jacobs ’75 and may have shared hers then. After graduation, Diane and I had jobs at Sotheby’s and I moved in with them at their not-yet-renovated loft on Pearl Street near Wall Street. At the time Guy was painting interlocking lines on horizontal canvas strips. A couple of years later, around 1980, he was in a suit and tie working with digital technologies. He was the first to show me interlocking white pixelated lines on a small grey computer screen.

In the mid 80s, Guy let me work after hours at his company, Interactive Picture Systems (which he later sold) exploring animation software. I introduced him to techniques I’d discovered in the digital signage industry, printing a photograph of one of his street paintings onto a six-foot long plastic sheet. He later told me that Yoko Ono noticed the print during a visit to IPS, and wanted to know all about it. The French Ministry of Culture invited him several times to conduct workshops in Paris. Innovation came to Guy naturally. He was more than fearless—he was deeply imaginative, I’d say eager to transgress.

Over a decade later, I visited Guy and his wife Liane at their house in Hillsdale, NY. He’d set up another company, Dragonfly, in his barn. Our kids met, I had a much-needed break from my Paris routine, sprinkled with intense conversations on the subject of interactive picture systems. Not many people grasped what that meant for those of us trying to reboot 20th-century esthetics. Guy was at the front lines, taking hits, wearing himself out at it, sharing what he could along the way. I tried to say ’thank you’ as best I could with an installation on art and artificial intelligence at the Salon Réalités Nouvelles 2023, that included Guy’s work. His prompt was: ’when Judd meets Mondrian, with silk blowing in the wind.’ The resulting images were very hip). Last month, his wife Liane showed work at the Abstract Project Gallery, Paris, in a group show entitled ’Diagrams,’ on the subject of interface design. There’s still so much ’rebooting’ left to do.”

Charles Read ’75 reminisced, “I first met Guy at the impressionable age of 13, and boy, did he make an impression on me. He was sophisticated, knowledgeable, funny–and fun. We were fast friends, fellow travelers in the realm of the visual arts at St. Paul’s School. Over four years there, we spent many hours together in a basement studio, scheming and dreaming, ultimately collaborating on a massive sculptural undertaking, 16-foot-tall letters: L-O-V-E. It was 1970. We said farewell that year at graduation, not sure when we’d again cross paths, but certain that we would.

I deferred my matriculation by a year at Princeton, and lost touch with him as he took another year or two to figure out what was next. Which was, of course, Princeton, where we literally ran into each other outside 185 Nassau in utter surprise and delight. Between subsequent comings and goings over several years, we collaborated and competed in creative endeavors–some classmates recently recalled coming across the two of us setting up an army of green toy soldiers on the cobblestones between Firestone and the Chapel–play with purpose. Along with collaborators in the E-quad, we organized a student-initiated seminar that asked whether the massive mainframe computers there might be tools for making art. That’s mostly what I remember about Guy: always instigating serious play, sometimes elusive, always elliptical. Never hesitant to say and do the unexpected or outrageous.

We were often in touch over the decades since. Sometimes it would be after a few years, and then he’d call or send a text, and we’d be right back at it, whatever ’it’ was, always pushing, probing, circling around the heart of the matter.”

Peter Wetzler recalled, “I first met Guy on campus sophomore year after I had returned my first leave of absence and Guy was then heading out to India to follow the 14-year-old master known as Guru Maharaji. He told me a story of sitting in the Garden behind Woolworth Music Center and a stranger walked up to him saying: ’You won’t find knowledge in books or in college,’ which he took as a sign to go to India.

And I don’t think I saw him again until 5 years later when I was writing for and editing eAR Magazine in Soho and he was living in a loft downtown and had a company called Interactive Picture Systems that took out an ad. We became very close after my wife Julie and I bought our church/home/studios in Kingston and his then company VIDEOsite lent our Center for Arts and Technology a multi-thousand-dollar Video Wall with a team of technicians to ’tune’ it for an event we had there. I used to have lunch with him in the park on Madison Ave near his offices and he would show me the ’sculptures’ that he had made out of litter that he then had made into a kind of paper mache and painted and hidden in trees throughout the park (something he continued to do later in life in Hudson with painted rocks). We collaborated on various art and music projects over the years including his company Musiclink which back in the days of Napster offered a vehicle for people who were downloading music for free to pay the artists directly. His sons Michael and Jake are both involved in music and they have put together a show of Guy’s work in Hudson.”

Allen Furbeck reflected, “Memories of Guy abound, and, as he himself did, both illuminate the world for me and inspire me.

My first memories are probably of him setting up toy soldiers outside Firestone. I hadn’t realized Charlie was involved with that as well. Later I believe he and my then roommate Alex McAlmon also went down in the stacks to find obscure books unlikely to be deshelved and set up the toy soldiers behind them so if at some future date someone did remove the book a soldier would be there to find and wonder about.

I remember him telling me once that his latest work consisted of going out and looking at stars, but when I mentioned that to him recently he had no memory of it. Maybe I made it up. Memory can be like that.

He started a whole new branch to the abstract paintings I was making when during a studio visit he commented on one of my paintings (a triptych the middle section of which was an empty space between the two outside canvasses), ’You can do three pretty well. Can you do four?’ Such a simple question but it spun off into a whole new direction for me.”

Eva Lerner-Lam concluded, “Guy’s words in our 45th Reunion art website ’Saving the world, one pixel at a time’ ring true to me even now.”

From our 45th Reunion art website, in his own words:

“My name is Guy Nouri. While at Princeton during the reign of Rosalind Krauss, and her masterful array of artists, I drew, painted, photographed, filmed, sculpted, and did computer graphics. I took every art history class available at Princeton. We had access to some of the best teachers and most exciting artists of the time.
 
Coming back together years later, the same gang has matured and is turning itself inside out trying to locate a common identity. While on the surface our art does not look alike and our styles diverge widely, there is an intelligence in our method which derived not only from our teachers but, importantly, through the close interaction with each other. 

I am certain that in a hundred years people will point at our work and just say:‘Princeton? Maybe Princeton 76. Yeah. That’s it!’

I have gone from deconstruction to AR. From developing visual software like ’PAINT’ and ’Movie Maker’ (Atari, EA, Microsoft) to Videosite (GTECH). And Magic Rings (hat). I have lectured, taught, and shown in US and Europe.

Now my primary focus is simply painting - painting pixels. XPix or external pixels to be precise.”

See these links:

Our class art website for our 45th Reunion, done by Malcolm Ryder and Pam Wesson:

https://malcolmryder0.wixsite.com/nassau-light/

and the link to our class virtual gallery, done by Allen Furbeck and Carol-Ann Braun, with work from then and now:

https://www.artsteps.com/view/6075ef2e4fddd0d432a97e77

The class sends deepest sympathy to his wife, Liane, sons Michael and Jake, and siblings Michael Nouri and Katherine Hughes Del Tufo. His family laid his ashes to rest in Amagansett.

Guy will be remembered at two services on the Princeton campus: the Princeton University Service of Remembrance at the University Chapel on February 21, 2026, and at the Class of 1976 50th Reunion Memorial Service on May 22, 2026.

The Princeton Class of 1976 will always hold, in honor and affection, the name of Guy Kimball Nouri.