Randall Bourscheidt, whose fascination with the arts led to a wide-ranging career that included acting in Andy Warhol’s experimental films, working as an arts administrator for New York City and leading the Alliance for the Arts advocacy group, died on April 19 in Albany. He was 81.
His death, at a hospital, was from complications of lung cancer, his husband, the architect and planner Josef Asteinza, said. He lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and in Stuyvesant, N.Y., near Albany.
As deputy commissioner of cultural affairs for New York City from 1981 to 1987 — and acting commissioner in 1982 and 1983 — Mr. Bourscheidt played a key role in securing a nearly threefold increase in the city’s arts budget under Mayor Edward I. Koch, according to a Municipal Art Society tribute.
From 1989 to 2010, Mr. Bourscheidt led the Alliance for the Arts, which had been founded in the 1970s and produced detailed and widely cited reports examining the economic contribution of the arts to New York City and the state. The findings became indispensable for grant applicants and arts administrators seeking to demonstrate the case for cultural funding.
One of his most significant achievements with the alliance was the Estate Project for Artists With AIDS, an advocacy and preservation program that he started with Patrick Moore, an arts writer and cultural adviser who later became director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Starting in the early 1990s, the Estate Project helped to digitally preserve the cultural heritage of artists — writers, filmmakers, musicians, choreographers and others — with H.I.V. and AIDS. The initiative has continued as Artists With AIDS, and the early archives are held at the New York Public Library.
The Alliance for the Arts’ activities were integrated into the Municipal Art Society and the public broadcaster WNET after Mr. Bourscheidt left the organization in 2010.
Robert Randall Bourscheidt was born on July 28, 1944, in Tulsa, Okla. He was the son of Robert W. Bourscheidt, who owned a trucking company, and Jane (Dieboll) Bourscheidt.
He graduated from Columbia University in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in history. As Randy Bourscheidt, he appeared in three of Mr. Warhol’s films from 1966: “Hedy,” “The Closet” and “Chelsea Girls.”
The last of these made Mr. Warhol into one of the most discussed figures in film. “Until then the general attitude toward what we did was that it was ‘artistic’ or ‘camp’ or ‘a put-on’ or just plain ‘boring,’” the artist noted in his 1980 memoir “Popism: The Warhol ’60s,” written with Pat Hackett. “But after ‘Chelsea Girls,’ words like degenerate and disturbing and homosexual and druggy and nude and real started being applied to us regularly.”
In 2018, Mr. Bourscheidt introduced the rarely seen films at a screening at the Museum of Modern Art.
In addition to his husband, Mr. Bourscheidt is survived by a sister, Diana Lynn Stein.
“Randy had a gift for bringing people together and building friendships,” Mr. Asteinza said in an interview. “He knew art and friendship brought us joy and through them we could make our lives better.”
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