January 1 – Gary Larson's single-panel comic The Far Side debuts in the San Francisco Chronicle.
February 7 – Pink Floyd's The Wall Tour opens at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena.
May 22–September 16 – Pablo Picasso Retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the largest and most complete Picasso exhibition ever held in the United States.
December 8 – Annie Leibovitz photographs John Lennon with Yoko Ono in New York for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine five hours before his murder.
Robert Hughes presents a series (with accompanying book), The Shock of the New, for BBC Television in the United Kingdom on "art and the century of change".
Benedikt Taschen opens a comic book store in Cologne which will evolve into the art book publisher Taschen.
Basil Blackshaw – Green Landscape
Arbit Blatas – The Monument of the Holocaust (reliefs, first edition)
Alan Chung Hung – Gate to the Northwest Passage (sculpture, Vancouver, British Columbia)
Keith Jellum – Mimir (sculpture, Portland, Oregon)
Nabil Kanso
Apocalyptic Rider
Time Suspended in Space (South Africa)
Georgia O'Keeffe – Llama in the Desert
Bryan Organ – Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton
Howard Post – Moving Cattle
George Segal – Gay Liberation (sculpture)
January 18 – Cecil Beaton, English photographer and stage and costume designer (b. 1904).
January 20 – William Roberts, painter (b. 1904)
February 4 – Stojan Aralica, famous Serbian Impressionist painter and academic (b. 1883)
February 6 – Albert Kotin, Russian-born American Abstract Expressionist artist (b. 1907).
February 17 – Graham Sutherland, English artist (b. 1903).
February 22 – Oskar Kokoschka, Austrian artist, poet and playwright (b. 1886).
March 5 – John Skeaping, English sculptor and equine painter (b. 1901).
March 18 – Tamara de Lempicka, Polish Art Deco painter (b. 1898).
April 21
Ľudovít Fulla, Slovak painter, graphic artist, illustrator, stage designer and art teacher (b. 1902).
Sohrab Sepehri, Persian poet and a painter (b. 1928).
May 15 – Len Lye, New Zealand-born American kinetic sculptor and filmmaker (b. 1901).
June 7 – Philip Guston, Canadian-born American Abstract Expressionist painter and printmaker (b. 1913).
June 23 – Clyfford Still, American Abstract Expressionist painter (b. 1904).
July – Robert Brackman, Ukrainian-born American artist and teacher (b. 1898).
August 26 – Tex Avery, American animator, cartoonist, and director (b. 1908).
September 14 – Maxwell Bates, Canadian architect and expressionist painter (b. 1906).
November 22 – Norah McGuinness, Irish painter and illustrator (b. 1901).
December 26 – Tony Smith, American sculptor, visual artist and theorist on art (b. 1912).
December 30 – Patrick Hennessy, Irish painter (b. 1915).
1980 in art Wikipedia (Text) CC BY-SA
