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Akutagawa was initially dismissed, by both his colleagues and the literary critics, as a mere “mosaicist,” lacking in originality.

Though best known as a painter, mosaicist and head of the art department at Scripps College, Sheets was also an architect, and this was by far his biggest building commission.

The execution is uneven, Mr. Beeson said, suggesting that the “mosaicist has had ideas above his technical ability,” producing what he called a “very sophisticated design done in a slightly naïve manner.”

Born in 1907 in Pomona, he became the head of the art department at Scripps College while also maintaining a career as a painter, designer, mosaicist and architect.

Mr. Spivak, a muralist and mosaicist who made a name for himself in the 1930s in the federal Public Works of Art Project and Works Progress Administration, designed a mural in which tools of garment design and manufacturing were rendered as abstracted forms floating on a straw-gold field.