SALT LAKE CITY -- Sculptor Avard Tennyson Fairbanks, who fashioned a bust of Abraham Lincoln and other figures for the U.S. Capitol, died Thursday morning of a heart attack. He was 89.
Other Fairbanks works included many statues for Mormon Church temples and buildings, a bronze medal of courage presented to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill by Canadian Prime Minister William Mackenzie King, the monument to 'Lycurgus the Lawgiver' in Sparta, and the heroic statue, 'Lincoln, the Frontiersman,' near Honolulu.
Other works include 'Nebula' at the New York World's Fair in 1933, and his sculpture 'Rain,' selected as one of the greatest U.S. sculptures for Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina.
Fairbanks was born March 2, 1897, in Provo, Utah. In 1910-11, he was awarded scholarships to study a the Art Students League in New York City. He traveled to Paris to study at the Ecole Des Beau Arts and the Ecole de la France Grande Chaumeire in 1913.
He returned to the United States at the outbreak of World War I. In 1920, he was appointed professor of sulpture at the University of Oregon and taught there until 1927, when he traveled to Italy on a Guggenheim Fellowship.
He earned his master's degree and doctorate at the University of Michigan, then founded the College of Fine Arts at the University of Utah.
Fairbank's funeral was tentatively set for noon Saturday at the Bonneville Mormon Stake Center.
