Thomas Hoving was a controversial figure in the art world who pioneered the transformation of stuffy art institutions into popular destinations for the masses. He died one year ago at age 78.

Hoving's most influential role was as director of New York's Metropolitan Museum, which he led during a tumultuous period from 1967 to 1977. He oversaw the opening of new galleries for Islamic art, the remodeling of its Egyptian wing and expanding showcases for American, African and oceanic art.

Hoving prided himself on trampling on museum conventions and blowing cobwebs out of the Fifth Avenue institution. For that, he was admired as a visionary but sometimes reviled as a huckster, willing to sell out to big donors or cheapen the experience of art with flashy tactics.

In the 1980s, he began editing Connoisseur magazine and emerged as a muckraking critic of the J. Paul Getty Museum's collecting of antiquities. His accusations that some items in the museum had been smuggled out of their homelands turned out to be true, and in the last few years the Getty has returned dozens of objects to their countries of origin.

Hoving, an author of several books, wrote an irreverent account of his years at the Met in "Making the Mummies Dance."

For more on the man who popularized art museums, read Thomas Hoving's obituary by The Times.

-- Michael Farr

Photo: Thomas Hoving in 1967. Credit: Associated Press

Jeanne-Claude was a flame-red-haired artist whose works of art with her husband Christo garnered worldwide attention in the 1960s and '70s for their massive size and scope. Jeanne-Claude, who like her husband only used a first name, died one year ago at age 74.

Among their epic installations was "Running Fence," installed in 1976, which consisted of 2,050 white fabric panels extending across 24 1/2 miles in Sonoma and Marin counties.

Another was "The Umbrellas," a bi-continental project made up of 1,760 gigantic, custom-made yellow umbrellas along an 18-mile stretch of Interstate 5 through the Tejon Pass and 1,340 blue umbrellas in Ibaraki, Japan.

The husband-and-wife team preferred temporary installations that were taken down after a couple of weeks. Like a rainbow, Jeanne-Claude once reasoned, a beautiful thing becomes just normal if it's there all the time.

For decades, Jeanne-Claude did not actually receive credit for her contributions to the art. It wasn't until the 1990s that the couple began putting both their names on their work. Still, she frequently made clear in interviews that she was not an artist when they first met.

"I became an artist out of love for Christo," she said. "If he had been a dentist, then I would have become one too."

For more on the artistic couple, read Jeanne-Claude's obituary that appeared in The Times. Also, see a photo gallery of their work.

--Michael Farr

Photo: Jeanne-Claude and Christo speak in 2008 at a gallery displaying their "Over The River" project in Denver. Credit: Associated Press

Earl Cooley was one of the first two U.S. Forest Service smoke jumpers to parachute into a forest fire.

Cooley, who died a year ago at age 98, made nearly 50 jumps. The first time was in 1940 during a fire in Idaho's Nez Perce National Forest. The first man to jump was Rufus Robinson, followed closely by Cooley.

"We didn't know what we were doing," Cooley told the Associated Press in 2000.

There was little training. His teacher had hung a parachute in a tree to point out the harness, shroud lines and release handles, then said: "Tomorrow, we jump."

Cooley's obituary by Patricia Sullivan of the Washington Post appeared in The Times on Nov. 19, 2009.

-- Keith Thursby

 Photo: Earl Cooley in 2006. Credit: Associated Press

Pop-up cards and books became a modern mainstream hit because of the passion for paper art that possessed Waldo Hunt, an entrepreneur and movable-book collector who spent much of his career in Los Angeles. Hunt died one year ago in Porterville, Calif., at age 88.

Hunt ushered in the modern renaissance in pop-up books when he revived the art form in the U.S. in the 1960s with his firms Graphics International, which was eventually bought by Hallmark and Intervisual Books.

For decades, his team of master paper engineers dominated the market for pop-up, boasting large clients such as Random House and Disney.

In addition to his career, Hunt also amassed at least 4,000 antique and contemporary movable-book titles. He gave about 500 antique pop-ups to UCLA before deciding to showcase them in the Waldo Hunt Children's Museum, opened in 1994 within his Santa Monica offices.

"Wally was a truly gregarious guru," said paper engineer David A. Carter, who worked for Hunt for seven years."He was very, very popular in the European markets. He would get up there and be singing songs. His personality is what really drove it. He was a walking party, and he took care of business too."

For more on the pop-up guru, read Waldo Hunt's obituary by The Times.

Photo: Waldo Hunt displays some of his company's pop-up ads in 1986. Credit: Associated Press

"It was the stupidest thing this country ever did."

That's what former Navy Secretary Dan Kimball said, according to Aviation Week, about the U.S. deportation of Qian Xuesen, a rocket scientist who became known as the father of China's space and missile programs.

Chinese-born Qian came to the United States in 1935 on a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and, after earning his masters degree there, went on to Caltech for his doctoral studies. He went on to teach and do research at both schools.

During his career, Qian contributed to the development of the "jet-assisted takeoff" technology, and he was the founding director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech.

But his brilliant career in the United States came to a screeching halt in 1950, when the FBI accused him of being a Communist and planning to exchange classified material. He denied the accusations and initially fought deportation.

After years of intense scrutiny and partial house arrest, however, he gave in and actively sought to return to his native China. In 1955, five years after his arrest, he was shipped off in an apparent exchange for 11 American airmen captured during the Korean War.

He was welcomed as a hero in China and became director of China's rocket research, a position from which he was credited with leading the country to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles, Silkworm anti-ship missiles, weather and reconnaissance satellites and putting a human in space in 2003.

For more on the scientist and the drama surrounding his deportation, read Qian Xuesen's obituary by The Times.

-- Michael Farr

Photo: Qian Xuesen in 1948.

Credit: Associated Press

Michael Kabotie was a Hopi artist and jeweler who was an innovator in the Native American fine arts movement. He died one year ago at age 67 from complications related to the H1N1 influenza.

A native Arizonan, Kabotie's work was often exhibited at Phoenix's Heard Museum. He also had connections in Southern California, teaching Hopi overlay techniques at the Idyllwild Arts summer program since 1983.

In a statement, Idyllwild President William Lowman called Kabotie "an extraordinary artist of the Hopi tradition, but also an extraordinary artist in any culture."

Kabotie studied engineering at the University of Arizona, but he left to pursue art and launched a career in 1966 with a one-man show at the Heard Museum.

Of his bold canvases, which often portrayed traditional Hopi life in contemporary media, the quiet artist once said: "My paintings speak a lot louder than me."

For more, read Michael Kabotie's obituary by The Times. Also, see his personal website, which contains samples of his work.

-- Michael Farr

Photo: Michael Kabotie. Credit: Joel Muzzy / Heard Museum

Pierre Cabrol was a French-born architect with Welton Becket & Associates who was the lead designer for the Cinerama Dome, the landmark theater now operated by ArcLight.

The Sunset Boulevard theater, completed in 1963, was based on the geodesic dome concept conceived by architect R. Buckminster Fuller. But instead of using the typical aluminum or glass, the Cinerama Dome is the only one made of concrete.

The theater has 316 interlocking hexagons that form its dome shell and can accomodate more than 800 guests who view an 86-by-32-foot curved screen.

Cabrol also was the lead designer on other significant projects by Welton Becket, including the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA, the General Electric Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair and the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville.

After 30 years with the firm, Cabrol retired from Welton Brecket and worked independently as an architect and landscape architect from 1988 to 1995.

For more, read Pierre Cabrol's obituary by The Times, and see a 1963 photo of the Cinerama dome being constructed.

--Michael Farr

Photo: Pierre Cabrol. Credit: Family photo

Irving Penn, who died one year ago at age 92, was one of the first commercial photographers to cross the chasm that separated commercial and art photography.

Penn, who began his work in the 1940s, had a "less is more" style that he applied to all his subjects -- models, cigarette butts, designer dresses. He isolated his subject against a plain backdrop, allowing for scarcely a prop and building a work of graphic perfection through his printing process.

Critics considered the results to be icons, not just images, each one greater than the person or object in the frame.

His most familiar photographs are the cosmetics ads he shot for Clinique that have appeared in magazines since 1968. Each image is a balancing act of face-cream jars, astringent bottles and bars of soap that threatens to collapse.

His work has appeared at New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he shot more than 150 covers for Vogue magazine.

"His approach was never obvious," Phyllis Posnick, who collaborated with Penn at Vogue, told The Times. "He would make us go further and dig deeper and look beyond the obvious solution to a photograph to find something that was unique. He had a great wit, and you see some of that in his pictures."

Penn's brother, the noted director Arthur Penn, whose films included "Bonnie and Clyde," died last month.

For more on the famous photographer, read Irving Penn's obituary by The Times. Also, see a photo gallery of his work.

-- Michael Farr

Photo: Irving Penn in a 1943 self-portrait.

In the early 1940s, a specter of doom larger even than World War II threatened the world's people: Population was growing rapidly and food was running out.

That danger was stymied by the work of scientist Norman Borlaug, whose revolutionary grain-farming techniques brought agricultural self-sufficiency to developing countries around the world. Borlaug died one year ago.

Borlaug collected thousands of strains of wheat from around the globe and tediously crossbred them to produce varieties that were much higher yielding and resistant to the diseases that were destroying crops.

In 1960, before his techniques were widely adopted, the world produced 692 million tons of grain for 2.2 billion people. By 1992, largely as a result of Borlaug's pioneering approach, it was producing 1.9 billion tons for 5.6 billion people -- using only 1% more land.

For his work, he became one of only five people in history to score the trifecta of humanitarian achievement, winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.

On Borlaug's 90th birthday, former President Carter said that he "has been demonstrating practical ways to give people of the entire world a higher quality of life. . . . He is a true humanitarian."

For more on a grain expert who is credited with saving millions of lives, read Norman Borlaug's obituary by The Times.

-- Michael Farr

Photo: Norman Borlaug. Credit: Texas A&M AgriLife

Francis Rogallo helped bring to reality the Icarus dream of personal flight for humans.

The inventor, who died one year ago, used old kitchen curtains and makeshift wind tunnels in his basement to develop a flexible wing that gave rise to such sports as hang gliding, paragliding, ultralight flight and kiteboarding.

"Suddenly, here was this idea that people had dreamed about for thousands of years -- to be able to fly like a bird with a personal set of wings," said Mike Meier, president of the Hang Glider Manufacturers Assn. and a principal at Wills Wing Inc. "All of a sudden, with a very simple apparatus...this was possible. It was profound."

Rogallo, who was a researcher at what is now NASA, tried for nearly a decade to interest the government and military aircraft builders in his wing design. It took the Soviet Union launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957 and the ensuing space race, however, for him to get their attention.

Beginning in 1960, NASA began testing the wing as a potential tool for bringing satellites back to Earth, an idea that was later abandoned in favor of standard parachutes and ocean recoveries.

For more, read Francis Rogallo's obituary by the Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Francis Rogallo with an implementation of his Rogallo Wing at NASA Langley Research Center. Credit: NASA Langley Research Center

Chris Connor was a smoky-voiced singer who helped pioneer jazz trio singing. She died one year ago after a more than 50-year career singing with small jazz groups.

Connor began her career in 1949, singing with the Claude Thornhill Orchestra's Snowflakes. She later recorded with Herbie Fields and sang with Jerry Wald's big band before joining the Stan Kenton Orchestra in early 1953.

She gained renown for her recording of "All About Ronnie" and other singles with Kenton before going solo in 1953 and having success with songs such as "Trust in Me" and "About the Blues."

Connor, who never received formal voice lessons, was known for her warm, cello-like tones that used little or no vibrato.

"What you begin to hear with Chris are breathy vocals and a slick-chick delivery that was both sexy and savvy," said jazz historian and journalist Marc Myers. "You never got the feeling with Chris that she was a helpless female, but you never got the feeling that she was bossy, either. And, as a result, almost everyone who heard her fell in love with her."

For more on the classic jazz vocalist, read Chris Connor's L.A. Times obituary.

--Michael Farr

Photo: Chris Connor. Credit: Los Angeles Times

That local casino -- you know, the one with the inexpensive buffet and frequent customer giveaways -- has on it the fingerprints of Frank Fertitta Jr., a bellman turned gaming mogul who pioneered the concept of neighborhood casinos in fast-growing Las Vegas. He died one year ago in Los Angeles.

Fertitta, founder of Station Casinos Inc., opened his first neighborhood casino -- simply named the Casino -- in 1976. The 5,000-square-foot gambling hall, attached to the Mini-Price Motor Inn and a short drive from Las Vegas Boulevard, gave the Strip's dealers and cocktail waitresses their own after-work hangout.

The casino went through many expansions, becoming Bingo Palace in 1977 and Palace Station in 1983. He eventually turned over the business to his sons, who later credited their father for building not only a popular entertainment hub, but also an upbeat work environment for his employees.

"The best thing about him was the culture he started," son Frank Fertitta III told the Review-Journal in 2006. "As the Bingo Palace grew into the Palace Station, people always wanted to come work for him. They liked the work environment, and that's the thing we've tried not to screw up."

Fertitta went on to start another casino, Texas Station, which he sold to his sons' company in 1995. Eventually, Station Casinos was involved in more than a dozen gambling operations, including upscale Green Valley Ranch in Nevada and Thunder Valley Casino near Sacramento.

For more, read Frank Fertitta's obituary by The Times.

--Michael Farr

Photo: Frank Fertitta Jr.: Credit: Craig L. Moran / Las Vegas Review Journal