Sculptor

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has received the gift of a life-sized plaster sculpture of French thinker Voltaire by Jean-Antoine Houdon. Houdon, widely considered Europe's finest 18th century sculptor, is best known for his sculptures of Thomas Jefferson (the basis for the portrait on the nickel), George Washington (a heroic marble statue), Benjamin Franklin and the French writer and encyclopedist Diderot. The J.

Richard Artschwager, an artist who turned his apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker into a distinctive approach to making sculptures and paintings that defy easy categorization, died Saturday in Albany, N.Y., following a brief illness. He was 89. A retrospective of Artschwager's work, which travels to the UCLA Hammer Museum in June, closed Feb. 3 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. It was the Whitney's second Artschwager retrospective and will be the third to be shown in Southern California.

American travelers, is J. Seward Johnson stalking you? Because he certainly seems to be stalking me. J. Seward Johnson , 82, is a sculptor. In fact, he might be the most ubiquitous American sculptor you've never heard of. If you've spent any time at all in big and medium-sized American cities in the last decade or two, you've probably bumped into his work -- usually human figures, life-sized and larger -- and you've probably smiled without noting his name. Since 2005, Johnson has been taking familiar two-dimensional images - often a famous photo or an Impressionist painting - and casting them as larger-than-life, three-dimensional sculptures, their contours smooth and boldly colored.  Jumbo kitsch, some people say. Remember the famous black-and-white photo of the sailor kissing the young woman in Times Square at the end of World War II?

In a sunny, wood-paneled, south-facing room on the second floor of the Huntington Art Gallery, visitors who've come to peruse the Flemish Madonnas and Constable landscapes, the cases of stately British silver and florid French porcelain, will happen upon something a little unusual over the next couple of months. It's not obvious at first. At the end of a hallway at the top of the staircase, a tall, slender sculpture appears framed in a window. It has a delicate and graceful mien, not dissimilar from those of the 18th century ladies in the portrait gallery downstairs.

Ruth Duckworth, a noted modernist sculptor and muralist who created abstract ceramic forms for pieces breathtakingly large and charmingly small in her studio in a renovated Chicago pickle plant, has died. She was 90. Duckworth died Oct. 18 at a Chicago hospice after a brief illness, said Thea Burger, her agent. She was both a master of ceramics and of escaping easy definition, the Washington Post said in a 2006 article on a traveling retrospective of Duckworth's work, which was shown at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery.

I was very pleased to see such an extensive article on the sculpture at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, knowing that two years were spent doing the three primary pieces, life-size bronzes of Jack Benny, Lucille Ball and Johnny Carson, two of which were in all four photographs. It was not until I read the entire article that I discovered no credit was given the sculptor. This is a common occurrence that needs correction. The writer of the article has his byline. The photographer is given credit.

The most public of the arts attractions slated for downtown's Horton Plaza shopping center will be the three artworks to be unveiled along with the center itself in August although public, in this case, doesn't necessarily mean popular. The three artists commissioned are certainly adventurous, if not avant-garde, and it's a matter of some suspense as to just what they'll come up with for the commercial gem of downtown's renaissance. The plaza developer, Ernest W. Hahn Inc.

John Wooden is back. Not soon enough, in this me-first, Black Mamba world riddled with ego and hubris. Wooden's glory grows with each passing year, and every time Jonathan Vilma appeals his NFL case, or Lance Armstrong insists it's all a set-up. With Vince Lombardi, Wooden is the symbol of "old school" values. His simple virtues, his stubbornness, his bone-deep integrity are needed now more than ever. Got a hole in your Friday schedule? Take your kid over to UCLA to meet Coach. In the little village of Westwooden.

"Art isn't a luxury. It's absolutely essential to our mental and physical well-being," sculptor John Dunn said. "If we're not exposed to some form of it early enough in childhood we suffer a kind of brain damage--the mental connections aren't made." It is a foggy Wednesday evening in an area of Cleveland Street that is a higgledy-piggledy tangle of rusting warehouses and automobile body shops.

Everyone told Sean Afshar he was crazy to leave a well-paying job at Douglas Aircraft to design and sell furniture. But then, they all laughed at Christopher Columbus, too. Afshar had left his native Iran 14 years earlier to study aeronautical engineering in England.

John Wooden is back. Not soon enough, in this me-first, Black Mamba world riddled with ego and hubris. Wooden's glory grows with each passing year, and every time Jonathan Vilma appeals his NFL case, or Lance Armstrong insists it's all a set-up. With Vince Lombardi, Wooden is the symbol of "old school" values. His simple virtues, his stubbornness, his bone-deep integrity are needed now more than ever. Got a hole in your Friday schedule? Take your kid over to UCLA to meet Coach. In the little village of Westwooden.

American travelers, is J. Seward Johnson stalking you? Because he certainly seems to be stalking me. J. Seward Johnson , 82, is a sculptor. In fact, he might be the most ubiquitous American sculptor you've never heard of. If you've spent any time at all in big and medium-sized American cities in the last decade or two, you've probably bumped into his work -- usually human figures, life-sized and larger -- and you've probably smiled without noting his name. Since 2005, Johnson has been taking familiar two-dimensional images - often a famous photo or an Impressionist painting - and casting them as larger-than-life, three-dimensional sculptures, their contours smooth and boldly colored.  Jumbo kitsch, some people say. Remember the famous black-and-white photo of the sailor kissing the young woman in Times Square at the end of World War II?