Sculpture

The Supreme Court, in a victory for artists and authors, ruled Monday that a homeless-rights group is not the exclusive owner of the copyright to a sculpture it commissioned an artist to create. The 9-0 decision (CCNV vs. Reid, 88-293) ordered further lower court hearings to determine whether the Community for Creative Non-Violence and its founder, Mitch Snyder, may share in the copyright of a work entitled "Third World America," which depicts the plight of the homeless. Justice Thurgood Marshall, writing for the court, said the sculpture is a "work made for hire" and, therefore, its creator, James Earl Reid of Baltimore, must at least share in the copyright.

The last of an absorbing trio of small Pacific Standard Time shows charting an especially rambunctious moment at Pomona College between 1969 and 1973 looks at the work of nine artists who were either students or on the school's faculty. Ranging from accomplished to unresolved, the paintings, photographs, sculptures and installations often ricochet off one another in form and content, underscoring an era of ferment. At the Pomona College Museum of Art, senior curator Rebecca McGrew and Getty Research Institute specialist Glenn Phillips have chosen 53 works for Part 3 of "It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles, 1969-1973.

He went away and hewed to the line. He came back and carved a life. That's what happened when Gardena celery farmer Heishiro Otani was shipped off to an American internment camp during World War II. To while away the time, Otani whittled. A half-century later, he's still at it. But don't think for an instant that the 84-year-old is some old codger rocking on the porch, lazily putting knife to stick. He works on a grander scale. And his works have a look of grandeur.

Over at the Getty Villa, a fantastic hybrid sculpture is holding court in a powerful exhibition that explores the ancient Mediterranean goddess Aphrodite. Based on a lost Greek original, a 1st century Roman carving of an exquisite hermaphrodite, part man and part woman, seductively writhes in a self-possessed erotic dream. Not to be outdone, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently opened a similarly dazzling show centered on another ancient hybrid being -- this one a plumed serpent.

Over at the Getty Villa, a fantastic hybrid sculpture is holding court in a powerful exhibition that explores the ancient Mediterranean goddess Aphrodite. Based on a lost Greek original, a 1st century Roman carving of an exquisite hermaphrodite, part man and part woman, seductively writhes in a self-possessed erotic dream. Not to be outdone, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently opened a similarly dazzling show centered on another ancient hybrid being -- this one a plumed serpent.

Perhaps the least glorious chapter in the creation of Walt Disney Concert Hall has finally ended in a confidential settlement of the 2-year-old lawsuit over "Collar and Bow," the gigantic sculpture that architect Frank Gehry envisioned extending a lighthearted greeting from the concert hall's doorstep -- until it literally began to fall apart during fabrication.

After six years of controversy about whether it was art or junk, the Split Pavilion sculpture garden overlooking the beach in Carlsbad is being dismantled. The public art project began as an effort to beautify the Carlsbad bluff, but quickly deteriorated into ridicule, outrage and then political backlash. The sculpture, commissioned by the Carlsbad Arts Commission from New York artist Andrea Blum for $35,000, cost the city an additional $350,000 to install.

In response to " 'Novel Ideas' Bound by Literal Works" by Cathy Curtis (Calendar, Nov. 16): With all my respect to one of (The Times') most vicious art critics, who knows her stuff very well, I would like to set one very important item in that article straight, which will completely change the distorted and wrong way she reviewed my sculpture "The American Dream." The book I was given was a double paperback by Edward Albee, the author of "Who Is Afraid of Virginia Wolf?" The actual title of the book was "The Zoo Story" and "The American Dream" (two stage plays)

A cloud hangs over cartoonist Paul Conrad's anti-nuclear war sculpture in Santa Monica. Faced with having to raise as much as $423,000 to repair the two-decade-old "Chain Reaction," city staffers have instead advised spending $20,000 to remove it. After hearing from activists eager to preserve the Civic Auditorium sculpture, the city's Arts Commission has recommended that the City Council vote to remove, or "deaccession," the work - ...

Marc Entin started his ice sculpture business just as the weakened economy melted demand for high-end party decorations. His Newport Beach company, Ice Bulb, has had a hard time selling the ice chandeliers, frozen furniture and ice-ball curtains that he thought would sustain the firm when he founded it 18 months ago. The recession has prompted many of Ice Bulb's potential customers to chip ice sculpture and decor out of their newly squeezed event...

Gideon Obarzanek can trace much of his artistic drive to a creative restlessness that stems, he says, "from an interest beyond pure dance. " "How can dance coordinate with other forms?" he asks. "This has been a creative engine for me, in that I've been able to make unique works. But it's also a frustration. Because a part of me always wants to go off and do other things and then I keep getting pulled back into a dance context. " Since founding the Australian dance company Chunky Move in 1995, Obarzanek has consistently pushed the boundaries of how contemporary dance can be viewed and understood through mining his omnivorous interests in theater, film, visual art, science and technology.

The floor sculptures that Mel Bochner made in the early 1970s now rank as classics of conceptual art. Arrangements of stones, coins and on occasion hazelnuts on the ground, they were designed to lay bare the first principles of sculpture. "I was trying to find out what the minimum definition of a sculpture was — what could be a sculpture and only a sculpture. It has to be three-dimensional," the artist said, reached by phone in New York. "And I wanted it to be a useless thing. A lot of pebbles you could put in your driveway; an individual pebble has no exchange value.

Kenneth Price, a prolific Los Angeles artist whose work with glazed and painted clay transformed traditional ceramics while also expanding orthodox definitions of American and European sculpture, died early Friday at his home and studio in Taos, N.M. He was 77. Price had struggled with tongue and throat cancer for several years, his food intake restricted to liquids supplied through a feeding tube. Despite his infirmity, he continued to produce challenging new work and to mount critically acclaimed exhibitions at galleries in Los Angeles, New York and Europe.

Over more than a century, Dorothea Tanning collided and consorted with artistic titans of the 20th century who included Pablo Picasso, John Cage and Joseph Cornell. She designed sets for George Balanchine ballets, played romantic matchmaker for poet Andre Breton and appeared in Hans Richter's avant-garde films - but she remained best known as the wife of Surrealist Max Ernst, to whom she was married for nearly 30 years Tanning, who was also a celebrated American artist and poet, and came to be known as "the last living Surrealist," died Tuesday at her New York City home, according to the Dorothea Tanning Collection and Archive, a foundation she established in 1995 to preserve her work.

A cloud hangs over cartoonist Paul Conrad's anti-nuclear war sculpture in Santa Monica. Faced with having to raise as much as $423,000 to repair the two-decade-old "Chain Reaction," city staffers have instead advised spending $20,000 to remove it. After hearing from activists eager to preserve the Civic Auditorium sculpture, the city's Arts Commission has recommended that the City Council vote to remove, or "deaccession," the work - ...

The new Matthew Marks Gallery in West Hollywood isn't just the first ground-up building by the 42-year-old Los Angeles architect Peter Zellner. A clean-lined, windowless stucco box on Orange Grove Avenue just south of Santa Monica Boulevard, it is also almost entirely free-standing. Attached on one of its four sides to a mortuary, it is otherwise visible in the round, making it one of the most conspicuous architectural debuts to appear in Southern California in a number of years. At the same time, Zellner's design operates in large part as the straightforward and accommodating backdrop for an artwork by the 88-year-old artist Ellsworth Kelly.

In the early-morning mist, Manhattan gallery owner Andre Emmerich drove his Jeep Cherokee over the rolling hills of his 140-acre retreat in Upstate New York. Suddenly out of the gray clouds loomed an imposing sight--four giant needles of steel that make up Beverly Pepper's four 27-foot-high statues, titled "Central Park Plaza." The 65-year-old Emmerich has collected about 120 bronze, steel and stone sculptures and has strategically placed them on his country estate that once was a Quaker farm.

A sculpture honoring the contributions of millions of Mexican immigrant laborers who came to the United States more than 50 years ago was unveiled Sunday. The statue honors the braceros who came to this country under an agreement between the United States and Mexico aimed at filling labor shortages caused by World War II. The sculpture was dedicated at McLeod Lake Park as part of a daylong celebration honoring International Bracero Day.

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.

Julia Sampson Hayward Champion tennis player in 1950s Julia Sampson Hayward, 77, a champion tennis player who won the women's doubles and mixed doubles titles at the 1953 Australian Open, died Tuesday at her home in Newport Beach of complications from a fall, her family said. Known as both Julie Sampson and Julia Sampson while playing at the national and international level, she had her best season in 1953. At the Australian Open, she teamed with Maureen Connolly to win women's doubles and with Rex Hartwig to win mixed doubles.