John Henry Waddell

John Henry Waddell
Waddell in March, 2007
Born	1921 Des Moines, Iowa
Nationality	American
Occupation	artist

John Henry Waddell (born February 14, 1921) is an American sculptor, painter and educator.

Waddell was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1921 and moved to Evansville, Indiana at the age of ten. There he began to study art at the Katherine Lord Studio, and by the age of 16 was teaching classes there. In 1939, he graduated from high school and moved to Chicago where he had received a full tuition scholarship to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

His education was interrupted by a stint in the military from 1943 to 1945. The following year found Waddell back in Chicago attending the School of the Art Institute and then the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill. In 1947, his teaching career resumed and he taught at the YMCA Adult Education Program in Chicago until 1954. He moved to Evansville in 1955, this time teaching at the National College of Education. From 1955 to 1957, Waddell served as head of Art Education at the Illinois Institute of Technology before relocating to the Southwest where he became head the Art Education school at Arizona State University (at that time Arizona State College). In 1964 he resigned from that academic position to devote all his time and energy to his sculpture.

In 1949, Waddell married for the second time, to Ruth Holland. Waddell has six children.

Waddell spent the early 1960s in Mexico, continuing to create new works and studying the casting process. In September 1963 a bomb exploded in a church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls. This prompted Waddell to create That Which Might Have Been: Birmingham 1963, a work that was set up at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Phoenix in 1969. A second casting was later installed at the Carver Museum and Cultural Center in Phoenix.