Artist Claes Oldenburg, maker of huge urban sculptures, dies

By The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Pop artist Claes Oldenburg has died. He was 93. The Sweden-born Oldenburg studied at Yale and the Art Institute of Chicago and gained his initial fame in performance art. But Oldenburg’s lasting fame focused on his sculptures, many of them turning normally ordinary objects like clothespins or baseball bats into huge sculptures in public spaces. Among his most famous works are “Clothespin,” a 45-foot steel clothespin installed near Philadelphia’s City Hall in 1976, and “Batcolumn,” a 100-foot lattice-work steel baseball bat installed the following year in front of a federal office building in Chicago