Design: Garden-Variety Archetypes

A millionaire's sculptures bring a human touch to cityscapes

Manhattan cabbies sometimes stop for the hailing figure on Park Avenue, but he never gets in. Patrons new to Kathy Gallagher's, a chic Los Angeles eatery, request tables far from the cigar chomper who seems to be a fixture in the place. In Boca Raton, Fla., vacationers have called police because a youth has loitered too long staring at the sea.

The causes of these mistakes and double takes are not people but the uncannily realistic bronze figures of Sculptor J. Seward Johnson Jr. In parks and plazas from San Antonio to Seattle, some 120 of Johnson's life-size sculptures, many sporting colored clothing, capture the everyday details of ordinary citizens down to their crumpled brown bags and untied shoelaces. They portray carpenters, businesswomen, students, engaged in such activities as talking on a park bench, leaving a tennis court or simply scratching their backs. "We are surrounded by monolithic towers and cold glass in our cities," says Johnson. "My work celebrates mini-heroics; normal-size people reclaiming their humanness."

Art critics are unimpressed. "Kitsch," some of them proclaim. The works, says Los Angeles Sculptor Richard Oginz, "strike a Norman Rockwell note." Indeed, Johnson is not about to knock Rodin off his pedestal, but his garden-variety American archetypes are a welcome—and welcoming—relief from "plunk art": find a plaza, acquire something made of huge welded beams, then plunk it down.

Explains Johnson: "One of my fellas sitting on a bench says, 'Come on in, celebrate the recess, the lunch break; take a moment and use this spot.' " Touching and interacting with the sculptures are not only encouraged, but are unstoppable. Children sit in their bronze laps; on chilly nights adults drape sweaters over their shoulders. In the Richard J. Hughes Justice Complex, in Trenton, N. J., hundreds of passers-by have sat in the empty seat across the chess table from the bronze figure of a perplexed loser to have their picture taken. In southeast Washington, neighborhood youths have adopted the hot-rodding Skateboarder as one of their own. Says John Harrod, executive director of the Market 5 Gallery, a performing arts center that stands near by: "The kids box with it, talk to it and put cigarettes in its mouth."

The figures, priced at about $30,000, have been purchased by or are on loan to financial institutions such as New York City's Chemical Bank and Merrill Lynch, real estate developers like Dallas' giant Trammell Crow, and colleges from Yale to William and Mary. Although each of the 70 or so figures Johnson has fashioned to date has been cast in editions of up to seven, the sculptures are usually personalized for clients. For Tyndale House, a Wheaton, Ill., publisher of religious books, the hamburger-munching young man of Out to Lunch studies the 23rd Psalm in the Bible he is reading; but near the entrance of a Kansas City McDonald's he reads There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Says Deborah Emont-Scott, a curator at Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: "It is so appropriate for its location it is almost benign."