In 1955, James Dean went to the studio of Hollywood-based artist Kenneth Kendall after seeing a sculpture he had done of Dean’s hero, Marlon Brando, and requested that Kendall do a bust of him. Kendall began the sculpture the night that Dean was killed. Decades later, in commemoration of the use of the Observatory in the film, Rebel Without a Cause, a monument featuring the bust Dean commissioned was placed on the west side of the Observatory lawn (a second copy of the bust can be seen at the James Dean Memorial Park in the actor’s hometown of Fairmount, Indiana). The monument has now been restored and reinstalled in its new location, where visitors will now be able to snap pictures of the monument with the iconic Hollywood Sign in the same frame.
