Artists

Who owns the copyright to an artwork--the artist who created it or the group that commissioned it? The question will be answered in an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case that could be a bonanza for free-lance creators and a disaster for business. Community for Creative Nonviolence vs. Reid may sound like a street fight between an advocacy group for the homeless and a sculptor from Baltimore.

Design Loves Art. Say what? For some L.A. art dealers, the contemporary art program opening Thursday at the Pacific Design Center is rent-free space in a different part of town. For those who have lost galleries to the recession, it's a chance to go public again. For artists, it's an opportunity to do something big or be seen by a new audience at the enormous Melrose Avenue building known as the Blue Whale. And for the PDC -- which started the whole thing as part of its new fine arts mission -- the six-month project is an attempt to forge connections between art and design while filling empty spaces intended for the interior design trade.

Ecuadorean artist Oswaldo Guayasamin began his ascent toward world renown thanks to Nelson Rockefeller and the State Department, but he has no friends these days in the U.S. Embassy. Although French President Francois Mitterrand visited his home last month, and Mitterrand's wife is a regular house guest, some Americans denounce him as a leftist ingrate guilty of a perfidious insult to the United States.

Nam June Paik is late, very late, for an afternoon lunch meeting. So late that his assistant leaves the SoHo restaurant to see if the artist is still at his studio just around the corner. "It's pretty early for him," the assistant says apologetically on his way out. "He works all night. But he should be up for his breakfast by now." After a week of postponed appointments, the odds are still good that he will show.

Leo Politi captured some of Los Angeles' most charming places with his two dozen children's books and countless artworks. With brush and pencil, he immortalized the city's crumbling Victorian mansions, its parks and its ethnic diversity long before "multicultural" entered the language. Hailed as "the Artist of Olvera Street," Politi, who died in 1996, is commemorated in other neighborhoods and in cities including South Pasadena, Redlands and his native Fresno.

Pipe-smoking Norman Rockwell captured America's heart with his illustrator's art, but although the roots of his America were buried deep in New England, many of his famous paintings in the 1930s and '40s were products of a small Los Angeles area town: Alhambra. Hailed as "America's best-loved artist," Rockwell painted the iconography of U.S. life: apple-cheeked children and broad-shouldered soldiers, ideals embedded in the nation's self-image.

On screen in "Poseidon," the upcoming remake of the classic 1972 disaster movie about a capsized ocean liner, actor Kurt Russell jumps into the water and attempts to swim for his life. Off screen, John Roesch -- who makes noise for a living -- sits shivering in a bathtub, splashing his hands to match Russell's motions. A sound editor in a nearby recording booth captures the commotion on tape.

When Andy Warhol died, telephones at the Upstairs Gallery in Beverly Hills immediately started ringing. "Everybody was asking, 'What (Warhol art) do you have and when can I see it?' " recalled Lee Sonnier, a director at the highly commercial gallery. But last Monday, the day of Salvador Dali's death, the splashy showcase didn't get a single call about the late Surrealist's work.

Visual Arts / Museums Bowers Museum of Cultural History 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana, 92706; (714) 567-3600; Tue.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; Peter C. Keller, president. Background: The Bowers Memorial Museum opened in 1936 as a city-run museum devoted to the history of Orange County; closed in the mid-1980s, the museum reopened in 1992 as the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art.

The Oct. 21 death of artist R.B. Kitaj was a suicide by suffocation, the Los Angeles County coroner has found, saying the artist placed a plastic bag over his head. A note and an empty medicine bottle were nearby when one of Kitaj's sons discovered the 74-year-old painter dead at his home, Capt. Ed Winter, a coroner's spokesman, said Tuesday. Kitaj established his reputation while living as an American in London, where David Hockney became a close friend.