Anton van Dalen, Whose Art Examined an Evolving Neighborhood, Dies at 85

Anton van Dalen — a socially conscious artist, dedicated pigeon keeper and longtime assistant to the illustrator Saul Steinberg — lived on the Lower East Side for more than 50 years, documenting the neighborhood’s evolution from dereliction to gentrification in paintings, drawings and sculptures.

His best-known work was, perhaps, a performance piece called “Avenue A Cut-Out Theater,” a three-foot-tall cardboard model of his townhouse at 166 Avenue A. He filled it with hand-painted and photographed cutouts of police officers in riot gear, junkies, homeless people, sex workers, hawks, pigeons and dogs, as well as a burned-out car, churches, temples and community gardens.

At performances, often for students at his home studio, he reached inside the model, removed the cutouts and laid them on a table and on the floor. He told the story of a neglected part of the city that reminded him of a war zone — like his native Holland during World War II — when he moved there in the late 1960s and how it turned into an enclave of wealthy residential and commercial developers.

Describing a performance by Mr. van Dalen in 2015, the critic David Frankel wrote in Artforum: “The box also gave him something of the quality of the old-time itinerant musician or carny with a hurdy-gurdy or box of puppets on his back — in other words, someone unfixed and mobile, making a self-contained kind of art that he can produce easily wherever he goes.”

“It was magical, like seeing Calder’s Circus,” said Wendy Olsoff — a founder of the PPOW Gallery in Manhattan, referring to the troupe of miniature circus performers and animals that the sculptor Alexander Calder created and performed with. The gallery has hosted three solo exhibitions of Mr. van Dalen’s work.