In July 2026, REM celebrates the following anniversaries:
- The 94th birthday of Nam June Paik, a Korean-born American artist who achieved international notoriety for his destructive, neo-dada activities and visionary, esthetic experiments with electronic media. After studying at the University of Tokyo, he associated himself with progressive artists such as John Cage and the Fluxus group, and began exploring electronic media as an art form. His attitude toward the televisual environment was marked by a radical openness as he explored the esthetic potential of television and video in an all-encompassing way.
- The 103rd anniversary of the formation of Mavo, a coterie of vanguard artists, designers, and poets centered on Tokyo between July 1923 and late 1925. It sought to politicize art amid the repressive ultra-nationalist atmosphere of interwar Japan. As such, it was the first Japanese movement to break with conventional academic practices and explore intermedial spaces.
- The 144th birthday of David Davidovich Burliuk, deemed by many as the founding father of Russian Futurism. Burliuk was a painter, writer, poet, performance artist, journal editor, and publisher. He is considered to be a major figure of both the Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde movements and was instrumental in establishing the public stance of Russian Futurism by lecturing, performing, and publishing multiple collections of art and poetry.
- The 126th birthday of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. While often known as the wife of American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda was a dancer, essayist, novelist, and painter in her own right. She began painting in 1925 and would continue this for the rest of her life. She also wrote cultural commentary, several short stories, and an autobiographical novel, Save Me The Waltz, which contains vivid and original imagery, as well as hints of the surrealist influences that would be more fully realized in her painting.