Tony Sheets went his own way as an artist, rarely working directly with his famous father. But in later years, Millard Sheets’ legacy became his son’s.
Tony led the art program at the Los Angeles County Fair, just as his father had done a half-century earlier. And he devoted his energies in recent years toward rescuing murals at Home Savings and other buildings by his father that were threatened by demolition.
The last surviving child of Millard Sheets, Tony Sheets died Dec. 10 at age 82 in Oregon after several years of declining health.
On Facebook, Brian Worley, who worked with both Tony and Millard, wrote: “The Sheets legacy will continue but it has lost the brightest light.”
Millard Sheets was a watercolorist and muralist who was born in Pomona in 1907 and lived and worked in Claremont before his 1989 death. As a latter-day admirer, I was thrilled to meet his son.
Tony, hired in 2007, was the fair’s director of art. His father had held the same post from 1931 to 1956. The 1937 Fine Arts Building had been renamed the Millard Sheets Art Center in his honor.
Many of the 300,000 annual visitors might never otherwise set foot in an art museum. The mission, as Tony told me in 2010, was “to bring art to the people.” That was part of his DNA. His father had held a similar view. And his son embraced that.
“I don’t try to fill his shoes. I try to fill his spirit,” Tony said.
Born in 1942, John Anthony Sheets was raised in Padua Hills, an artists’ colony above Claremont, studied with or apprenticed for some of the city’s well-known artists and, after some rebellious years, made peace with his father and assisted him at times.
By the 2000s, Millard’s commercial art in public or semi-public places was increasingly in jeopardy as Home Savings, for which he had done 40 mosaic murals, became Chase Bank, and those and other buildings were shuttered, renovated or repurposed.
In 2008, a 1970s terminal at San Jose International Airport was set to be demolished, taking a 28-by-35-foot Sheets mural with it.
“Tony investigated and found it was actually on canvas that could be detached and moved. As a result, that great mural is today in the new terminal,” Alan Hess, an architectural historian, wrote after Tony’s death.
Under Tony’s direction, the massive “Pleasures Along the Beach” mosaic mural, made up of thousands of pieces of colored glass, was saved from a Santa Monica Home Savings. It was repaired by Worley, who then oversaw its installation in 2024 outside the Hilbert Museum of California Art in Orange.
Tony also consulted on the restoration of his father’s twin Rainbow Tower mosaics, 31 stories high, on the sides of the Hilton Hawaiian Resort Village in Honolulu, and he rescued an 80-foot Tournament of Roses mural that found a home at Pasadena City College.
Advocating for his father’s art, his late-in-life calling, resulted in saving many examples that otherwise would have been lost.
“I think that’s maybe his biggest contribution,” Catherine McIntosh, board member of the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art and a family friend, told me. “It’s probably the thing that will be most important in the long term.”
Adam Arenson got to know the younger Sheets while researching Millard’s Home Savings art for his book “Banking on Beauty.” By email, Arenson said: “Tony Sheets was first and foremost an artist, talented and with his own sometimes quirky vision.”
One of the county fair shows he organized was on collectors and collecting, with a man’s assemblage of lunch boxes framed inside a wall-sized lunchbox. The 2009 fair show had this tongue-in-cheek title: “The Making of Art: The First 30,000 Years.”
Tony would drive down from Oregon in an RV with his wife, Flower, for the duration of the fair through his last one in 2015. Friendly and low-key, he always appeared glad to see me and would walk me around the exhibit to point out little touches.
A signature element of his tenure was to have artists at work inside the gallery or out on the patio, blowing glass, crafting jewelry, weaving threads. “People love to see artists at work,” he told me. “It makes them see they can do it.”
Like his father, Tony took on several monumental commissions.
“Gift of the Valley,” a painted mural of an orange tree, was unveiled in 2017 at Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center. Measuring 30 by 83 feet, the mural wraps around two sides of a parking structure on Orange Grove Avenue and can be glimpsed from the 10 Freeway.
His work is also in downtown Los Angeles. Finishing up lunch on a recent weekend at Grand Central Market, I realized two of those pieces were just blocks away above Third Street.
“The Evolution of Los Angeles” is on the west side of the former L.A. Times parking structure on Broadway. “The Evolution of Printing” is on the structure’s east side on Spring. The bas-relief murals in concrete were produced from 1988-89 and are said to measure 66 by 35 feet.
They’re impressive to take in, both in their massive scale and in their compression of centuries into an easy-to-digest timeline of images. The one about printing begins with (I think) the ancient Phoenicians, winds through Gutenberg and ends with — be still my heart — a newsboy hawking newspapers.
I’m aware of but haven’t seen another mural, a frieze, that is in downtown’s World Trade Center. It sports yet another grand title, “The History of World Commerce.”
I don’t know who will advocate for saving Millard Sheets’ artwork in his son’s absence. But with talks about renovating the World Trade Center into apartments, it might be that someone will need to advocate for saving Tony Sheets art too.
David Allen writes Friday, Sunday and Wednesday for newspaper sheets. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on X.