Sculptors

Name: Bill King Company: Movieland Wax Museum Thumbs up: "I've always had the ambition of being able to make a living as a full-time artist. I have a good deal of freedom here and a good deal of challenge at the same time. What I do gets reviewed by tens of thousands of critics. I enjoy the challenge and the technical aspect--the whole process, the mold making, the materials that go into it. When we conceive of these figures, we try and capture some drama."

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.

John Frame and Peter Shelton have won the County Museum of Art's 1985 Young Talent Purchase Award. The two Los Angeles sculptors are winners of the 23rd annual event, which awards $3,000 to each recipient in exchange for a work of art to be selected for the museum's permanent collection. The announcement, made Sunday afternoon at a ceremony at Chaya Brasserie, put an end to the rampant speculation that typically accompanies the annual competition.

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.

In 1981, Jeff Nishinaka was chugging along at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design painting, drawing and studying graphic design when a teacher's remark changed his life. "He told me to be different from everyone," says Nishinaka. "So I started experimenting with paper, and this clerk at an art supply store said, 'Oh, you do paper sculpture?' and I was like, 'Is that what you call it?'

Built of unfired clay, the full-scale lowrider appears to be decomposing, literally turning into dust, like a giant memento mori. The hot rod dominates a teacher's small studio at Cal State Long Beach. Standing next to the clay car, Kristen Morgin, its diminutive maker, says with a shy smile: "It's a little off the beaten track." Way out there would be more accurate.

Inside a Venice studio one block from the beach, architect Frank Gehry sits in a corner, naked from the waist up. Nearby is artist Ed Moses, wearing only suspenders. Both are busts, recent sculptures by Robert Graham. Gehry and Moses are longtime friends of Graham. With Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Kenneth Price, Chuck Arnoldi, Larry Bell, Peter Alexander and Tony Berlant, they were part of a creative group who worked and played in Venice beginning in the 1960s and '70s.

In Cathy Curtis' review of the reopened Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, she remarked on the "kitsch" of Allan Houser's sculptures, which "no major contemporary museum would want." First of all, the Bowers is a museum of cultural art and does not claim to be a museum of contemporary art. Second, what could be more appropriate for a cultural museum than to acquire sculptures from the man who has been the inspiration for today's generation of Indian sculptors? However, calling Allan Houser an "Indian artist" would overlook his debt to Moore, Arp and Brancusi and his ceaseless experimentation with abstraction.

Modern artworks by Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and others, estimated as worth more than $500,000, have been stolen from an Athens museum, police said Saturday. The 38 lithographs and prints by some of the world's most distinguished painters and sculptors belonged to a private collection on display at the Goulandris-Horn Foundation since Feb. 7. Prints by Spanish painter Joan Miro, French painter Fernand Leger and Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti were among works missing from the foundation.

Tu Ly cut repeated bites out of the huge redwood log, gradually transforming it into a likeness of the stuffed wild boar he was using as a model. In his outdoor studio, the chain-saw sculptor carved his latest creation, which was ordered by a woman as a gift for her hunter husband. It would take Ly three days to complete it and cost the woman $500. Ly, 44, was surrounded by 250 redwood statues, a mix of his own work and the creations of other chain-saw artists.

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?

When L.A. photographer Fredrik Nilsen traveled to Taos to visit Ken Price last September, a few months before the artist died of throat and tongue cancer, he did not know what to expect. Although Nilsen had traveled within New Mexico a bit before, he had never spent time in Taos, let alone on the dramatic 7,500-foot-high mesa where Price had a home and studio with 360-degree views. He had never met the ceramic artist, who first came to fame through the Ferus Gallery in L.A. in the 1960s before moving with his wife, Happy, to New Mexico.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scored 38,387 points in his NBA career -- a big reason why a spot is now reserved for his image in bronze outside Staples Center. On Nov. 16, it will become the sixth artwork in an extremely popular array of sports statuary at the venue. The unveiling announced Thursday by the Los Angeles Lakers, who co-commissioned the piece with Staples Center, means another score for the Rottblatt-Amrany studio of Highwood, Ill., which created the three statues of Lakers greats already on the plaza.

Elizabeth Catlett, a sculptor and printmaker who was widely considered one of the most important African American artists of the 20th century despite having lived most of her life in Mexico, has died. She was 96. Catlett, whose sculptures became symbols of the civil rights movement, died Monday at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, said her eldest son, Francisco. Her imposing blend of art and social consciousness mirrored that of German painter Max Beckmann, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and other artists of the mid-20th century who used art to critique power structures.

The Venice art studio and residence of actress Anjelica Huston and her late husband, sculptor Robert Graham , is on the market for $13.9 million. Near the sand and overlooking the ocean, the live/work space includes three bedrooms and 31/2 bathrooms in 13,796 square feet. Features include a dance studio, a gym, a media room, an office and a service entrance. The five-story structure was built in 1994. There is a heated pool and parking for 10 cars. Huston, 60, is a regular on the TV show "Smash" and had a recurring role on "Medium" from 2008 to 2009.

Contrary to popular belief, the sculpture of the ancient world was intensely colorful, with statues, friezes and decorative objects regularly covered in brilliant pigments intended to enhance their lifelike qualities. But as curator Roberta Panzanelli explains in the fascinating catalog for "The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture From Antiquity to the Present," now at the Getty Villa, it was the Renaissance and the Neoclassical era -- the two major periods of classical revival -- that shaped our understanding of ancient sculpture, and neither was particularly disposed to color.

On that gleaming Italian coastline beside the Mare Ligure, where the bright Crayola colors of Viareggio's summer cabanas blaze against the seascape, the Appenine Mountains tumble down about the shore. As they approach Pisa to the south, they pause to plant creamy stone togas in solid massifs of rock. These ranges, wintry-white all year, are mountains of marble. Chippings from many millennia form the great quarries of Massa, Carrera, Querceta.

Sculptor Abdul Hameed is proud of how his art form holds a mirror up to society, from Iraq's ancient civilization to its current times of pain and hope. Sculpture "is one of the means which reflect the reality of life," says the chief of the sculpture department at Baghdad's Institute of Fine Arts. "We can't cancel this art in our society. If we do so, we isolate ourselves from the world. " Sometimes, however, reflecting reality can be a hardship. During the Saddam Hussein years, only statues for — and of — Hussein were encouraged, Hameed remembers.

John Chamberlain, a prolific American sculptor whose use of crushed automobile sheet metal became his signature during a career that spanned half a century, died Wednesday in New York City. He was 84. Reportedly in poor health, he had been working on a retrospective exhibition scheduled to open Feb. 24 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, his second at the Manhattan institution. The artist's death was announced by his wife, Prudence Fairweather, although no cause was given.