Deaths (Obituaries)

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      John Everett Benson, Who Chiseled John F. Kennedy’s Grave, Dies at 85

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      A master of the ancient and exacting art of carving into rock, he was 25 when he began his first major commission, at Arlington National Cemetery. John Everett Benson, a master stone carver, designer and calligrapher whose chisel marked the deaths of presidents, playwrights, authors and artists, as well as generations of American families — and whose elegant inscriptions graced museums and universities, government buildings and houses of worship — died on Thursday in Newport, R.I. He was 85.His son Christopher said he died in a hospital but did not specify the cause.Mr. Benson practiced the ancient and exacting art of carving into rock; slate was his preferred medium. He did so, precisely and gorgeously, on cornerstones, gravestones and monuments, as his father had before him, working out of an atelier in Newport called the John Stevens Shop. Founded in 1705, it is one of the oldest continuously run businesses in the country.The art Mr. Benson practiced is mostly devoted to mortality, the brief span of a life, though it is designed for eternity, or something close to it. It is often described as the slowest writing in the world. Mr. Benson could spend a day carving a cross; a gravestone might take three months.For the inscriptions for the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, designed by I.M. Pei in the 1970s, he averaged an hour and a half carving each letter, some of which are nearly a foot tall. He and his team at the time, two young carvers named John Hegnauer and Brooke Roberts, spent months completing the painstaking work.Mr. Benson in 2020 at the John Stevens Shop, in Newport, R.I., with his son Nick, who took over his business in 1993, and his granddaughter Hope, who is training to be a stone carver like her father and grandfather.via Benson FamilyHe carved the words on the pedestal that supports Secretariat’s statue at Belmont Park; he also carved John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s credo into a slab of polished granite in Rockefeller Center. His elegant slate alphabet stone — alphabet stones are where lapidary artists show off their chops, their calligraphic feats and flourishes — lives in Harvard’s Houghton Library. He also worked on the National Cathedral in Washington, Yale University and the Boston Public Library, among other institutions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ben Vautier, Artist Whose Specialty Was Provocation, Dies at 88

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      A core member of the anti-art movement Fluxus, he died by suicide hours after the death of his wife of 60 years.Ben Vautier, a French artist and agitator who often worked under the moniker Ben, and who as a core member of the anti-art collective Fluxus blurred the boundaries of high and low, art and life, while adhering to the credo “Everything is art,” died on June 5 at his home in Nice, France. He was 88.He died by suicide shortly after his wife, Annie Vautier, a performance artist he married in 1964, died of a stroke, his children, Eva and Francois, posted on social media. “Unwilling and unable to live without her,” they wrote, “Ben killed himself a few hours later at their home.”Theirs was an intense, if tangled, relationship. “We called her “Sainte-Annie,” Mascha Sosno, a friend, was quoted as saying in a recent article on the France Info website.“It was difficult to live with him,” she added. “They argued all the time, but in fact they adored each other, and he was inseparable from Annie, too.”Forever looking to provoke, Mr. Vautier found a kindred spirit in 1962 when he met George Maciunas, who spearheaded the avant-garde Fluxus movement of the 1960s, which included Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and other artists, and which drew from the iconoclastic Dada movement of the early 20th century.Fluxus, as articulated in Mr. Maciunas’s 1963 manifesto, was intended as a revolution, a call to comrades to “promote living art, anti-art, promote non-art reality,” while purging the world of “dead art, imitation, artificial art.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lynn Conway, Computing Pioneer and Transgender Advocate, Dies at 86

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      She made significant contributions at IBM, but she lost her job because of her conviction that she inhabited the wrong body. She later fought for transgender rights.Lynn Conway, a pioneering computer scientist who was fired by IBM in the 1960s after telling managers that she was transgender, despite her significant technological innovations — and who received a rare formal apology from the company 52 years later — died on June 9 in Jackson, Mich. She was 86.Her husband, Charles Rogers, said she died in a hospital from complications of two recent heart attacks.In 1968, after leaving IBM, Ms. Conway was among the earliest Americans to undergo gender reassignment surgery. But she kept it a secret, living in what she called “stealth” mode for 31 years out of fear of career reprisals and concern for her physical safety. She rebuilt her career from scratch, eventually landing at the fabled Xerox PARC laboratory, where she again made important contributions in her field. After she publicly disclosed her transition in 1999, she became a prominent transgender activist.IBM offered its apology to her in 2020, in a ceremony that 1,200 employees watched virtually.Ms. Conway was “probably our very first employee to come out,” Diane Gherson, then an IBM vice president, told the gathering. “And for that, we deeply regret what you went through — and know I speak for all of us.”Ms. Conway in 1983 beside her Xerox Alto, an early personal computer developed at the company’s PARC laboratory.Margaret Moulton/Palo Alto WeeklyMs. Conway’s innovations in her field were not always recognized, both because of her hidden past at IBM and because designing the guts of a computer is unsung work. But her contributions paved the way for personal computers and cellphones and bolstered national defense.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Edward Stone, 88, Physicist Who Oversaw Voyager Missions, Is Dead

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      He helped send the twin spacecraft on their way in 1977. Decades and billions of miles later, they are still probing — “Earth’s ambassadors to the stars,” as he put it.Edward C. Stone, the visionary physicist who dispatched NASA’s Voyager spacecraft to run rings around our solar system’s outer planets and, for the first time, to venture beyond to unravel interstellar mysteries, died on Sunday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his daughter Susan C. Stone.Inspired by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957, while he was a college student, Dr. Stone went on to oversee the Voyager missions 20 years later for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which the California Institute of Technology manages for NASA.Twin aircraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched separately in the summer of 1977 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. Almost five decades later, they are continuing their journeys deep into space and still collecting data.Dr. Stone was the program’s chief project scientist for 50 years, starting in 1972, when he was a 36-year-old physics professor at Caltech. He became the public face of the project with the double launch in 1977.Dr. Stone in 1972 as a physics professor at Caltech. That year, he became chief project scientist of the Voyager program and held that post for 50 years, retiring in 2022.Caltech ArchivesTaking advantage of a gravitational convergence of four planets that occurs only once every 176 years, the spacecraft soared past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Wilmerding, Who Helped Give American Art an Identity, Dies at 86

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      American paintings were largely overlooked and undervalued until he came along. A scholar, curator and collector, he oversaw important exhibitions over the last 50 years.John Wilmerding, a towering figure in American art whose eclectic career as a scholar, museum curator and collector was instrumental in elevating the cultural significance and market value of painters such as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and Fitz Henry Lane, died on June 6 in Manhattan. He was 86.His brother, James Wilmerding, said the cause of death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was complications of congestive heart failure.When Mr. Wilmerding began teaching in the 1960s, American art was underappreciated, if not totally unknown. There were virtually no university survey courses in the subject, textbooks or major exhibitions.“American art just didn’t hold the same sort of attention and respect that European art did, and certainly the art of the Renaissance or the old masters,” said Justin Wolff, chairman of the art history department at the University of Maine and a former student of Mr. Wilmerding’s. “It was behind culturally. It didn’t really have an identity.”Mr. Wilmerding helped give it one.Mr. Wilmerding’s book “American Masterpieces” (2019) is a collection of his columns on art for The Wall Street Journal. He published 19 other books. David R. GodineHe published more than 20 books, including “American Masterpieces: Singular Expressions of National Genius” (2019), a collection of his columns on art in The Wall Street Journal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Akira Endo, Scholar of Statins That Reduce Heart Disease, Dies at 90

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      The Japanese biochemist found in the 1970s that cholesterol-lowering drugs lowered the LDL, or “bad” cholesterol, level in the blood.Akira Endo, a Japanese biochemist whose research on fungi helped to lay the groundwork for widely prescribed drugs that lower a type of cholesterol that contributes to heart disease, died on June 5. He was 90.Chiba Kazuhiro, the president of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, where Dr. Endo was a professor emeritus, confirmed the death in a statement. The statement did not give a cause or say where he died.Cholesterol, mostly made in the liver, has important functions in the body. It is also a major contributor to coronary artery disease, a leading cause of death in the United States, Japan and many other countries.In the early 1970s, Dr. Endo grew fungi in an effort to find a natural substance that could block a crucial enzyme that is part of the production of cholesterol. Some scientists worried that doing so might threaten cholesterol’s positive functions.But by 1980, Dr. Endo’s team had found that a cholesterol-lowering drug, or statin, lowered the LDL, or “bad” cholesterol level, in the blood. And by 1987, after other researchers in the field had published additional research on statins, Merck was manufacturing the first licensed statin.Such drugs have proven effective in reducing the risk for cardiovascular disease, and millions of people in the United States and beyond now take them for high levels of LDL.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Christophe Deloire, Who Strove to Protect Journalists, Dies at 53

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      As the leader and spokesman for Reporters Without Borders, he rescued some, sought refuge for others and lobbied for pluralism in the press.Christophe Deloire, whose nonpartisan organization to protect journalists rescued dissidents from jail and championed a diversity of viewpoints in the profession around the world, died on Saturday in Paris. He was 53.The cause was complications of brain cancer, according to Reporters Without Borders, the media group for which he served as secretary general for the last 12 years.Mr. Deloire, who was himself a journalist and an author, lobbied publicly and labored behind the scenes to promote a free press in countries that muzzled journalists. He helped negotiate freedom for those who had been threatened with arrest, imprisoned or held hostage.Marina Ovsyannikova, a former Russian state journalist who fled her country with the help of Reporters Without Borders, at the group’s offices in Paris in 2023.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesIn 2023, Reporters Without Borders, known by its French initials R.S.F., coordinated the clandestine escape of Marina Ovsyannikova, a former Russian state TV journalist who incensed the Kremlin by storming a live news program in 2022 to denounce the invasion of Ukraine.Ms. Ovsyannikova was fined and forced to choose between prison and exile. Then, after another public protest, she was placed under house arrest pending a trial. On her lawyers’ advice, she fled Russia with her 11-year-old daughter, evading the authorities by switching cars several times before trudging through mud to cross the border and make her way to France.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Debby Lee Cohen, Who Helped Prune Plastic From Schools, Dies at 64

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      Her successful campaign against foam lunch trays in New York City led to similar city and statewide bans — and taught a group of fifth graders how to take on City Hall.As an artist who liked to play with scale, Debby Lee Cohen created monumental pieces, like the giant puppets she designed for Manhattan’s annual Village Halloween Parade, as well as miniatures, like the tiny forest she once made for a work by the interdisciplinary artist and compose Meredith Monk, with whom she often collaborated.A decade and a half ago, she became a plastic activist when she learned the scale of waste in New York City’s public schools.Her daughter Anna, then in second grade at a school in the East Village, had announced that she was boycotting lunch after seeing an exhibition on climate change at the Museum of Natural History that included a diorama of polar bears atop a mountain of what she recognized as her school’s lunch trays. It was then that Ms. Cohen learned that school lunches were served on foam trays — and that the city’s more than 1,800 public schools were using and throwing out at least 800,000 of them daily.Ms. Cohen, an artist, animator, performer, puppeteer and environmental activist whose campaign to eliminate foam trays from New York City’s public schools paved the way for similar bans in the city and state — and who taught students how to advocate for themselves at school and at City Hall — died on April 7 at her home in Manhattan. She was 64.The cause was colon cancer, said her sister, Ellie Cohen.The interdisciplinary artist and composer Meredith Monk, left, and Robert Een wearing costumes designed by Ms. Cohen in a performance of Ms. Monk’s “Facing North.” Ms. Monk and Ms. Cohen collaborated frequently.T. JunichiIn 2009, after her daughter’s school lunch boycott — which she solved in the short term by making her daughter’s lunches herself — Ms. Cohen looked for organizations that were dealing with the tray issue. There were none. But she found like-minded parents who were also working to reduce the staggering amount of plastic waste in their children’s schools, and they banded together to push for citywide action.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More