Famed American artist and sculptor Richard Serra, known for turning curving walls of rusting steel and other malleable materials into large-scale outdoor artworks installed across the world, died on March 26 at his home on Long Island. He was 85.

Known by his colleagues as the “poet of iron,” Serra became world-renowned for his structures of arcs, spirals and ellipses. His works have been installed in landscapes and included in the collections of museums, from the MOMA in New York to the deserts of Qatar. In 2005, eight major works by Serra were installed permanently at the Guggenheim Museum in Spain.

Dr. David Egilman, a physician and expert witness who, over a 35-year span, gave testimony in some 600 trials involving corporate malfeasance, resulting in billions of dollars in awards for victims and their survivors, died on April 2, at his home in Foxborough, MA. He was 71.

A dogged researcher, he dug up incriminating evidence showing that, in many cases, drug companies knew the risks involved with putting a new medication on the market, but went ahead anyway.

In Cincinnati, where he worked with the U.S. Public Health Service, many of his patients were industrial and mining workers who had developed medical conditions after years of working in unsafe conditions. The experience cemented his determination to stand up against medical injustice. His company, Never Again Consulting, was a nod to his father’s experience during the Holocaust as well as the importance of not allowing the horrors of Nazi medical experimentation to be replicated.

Norman Miller, who arrived in Britain via the Kindertransport when he was 7 years old, died Feb. 24 in a hospital in Manhattan. He was 99.

In 1944, when he was 20 , he joined the British Army, hoping to find out what had happened to his family in Germany. Not until after the war did he learn in a letter from a friend who had survived the Jungfernhof concentration camp that his parents, sister and maternal grandmother had arrived there in late 1941, were shot to deaths and buried in a mass grave. Mr. Miller and his son Steven traveled to Riga in 2013, saw the remnants of the camp and went to the forest to fill three vials with soil from the killing fields.

At Mr. Miller’s burial in Paramus, NJ, his sons and other family members poured the soil from his vial onto the coffin after it was lowered into the grave. In his eulogy, Steven Miller said that the purpose of sprinkling the coffin with the Riga soil was “so that they, who were torn from him and never had a proper burial of their own, can finally be prayed over and reunited and laid to rest with their son.”

Michael Singer, a sculptor whose work blurred the lines separating art, landscaping, architecture and urban planning, died on March 14 at his home in Delray Beach FL. He was 78.

Mr. Singer was often characterized as a landscape architect with public commissions at sites around the country. But in fact, he was an artist who saw his medium and his ambition in expansive yet humble terms, with work that attempted to remediate humanity’s disruption of the natural world.

He spent 15 years in the forests of Vermont, “trying to figure out the human connection to the natural environment,” he told The New York Times in 2004. “How do we express it? How do we act in a way that isn’t controlling, destructive?” That connection was a concern for his entire career, even as he moved toward projects with multimillion-dollar budgets and five-year time frames. Such projects, he believed, demanded the insight of artists with, perhaps, unthought-of possibilities.

Sami Michael, an Iraqi-born Israeli writer whose novels illuminate the world of Jews from Arabic countries and their prejudices and discrimination that they, as well as Israeli Arabs, have experienced, died on April 1 in Haifa, where he lived. He was 97.

A native Arabic speaker, Mr. Michael had to master Hebrew to publish his first novel in 1974. Mr. Michael went on to write a dozen novels, three books of nonfiction, three plays and a children’s book, winning many awards and honorary doctorates. In a statement of condolence, referencing other Israeli world-class writers, President Isaac Herzog of Israel extolled Mr. Michael as a “giant among giants.”

Maurice El Medioni, an Algerian-born pianist who fused Jewish and Arab musical traditions into a singular style he called “Pianoriental,” died on March 25 in Israel. He was 95.

Mr. Medioni was among last representatives of a once-vibrant Jewish-Arab musical culture that flourished in North Africa before and after WWII. The Medioni style remained buried and nearly forgotten for decades during the war. Then, in 1996 at the age of 68, he released a breakthrough album, “Café Oran.” It led to a belated second life as a star of so-called world music and a mentor to a new generation of Israeli musicians eager to recover the musical heritage of their Sephardic heritage.

Ellen Ash Peters, a legal trailblazer who was the first woman on the faculty of Yale Law School, the first female chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, and who wrote a landmark civil rights decision in 1996 desegregating public schools in Hartford, died on April 17 at home in West Hartford. She was 94.

In her 18 years on the Connecticut court, Justice Peters wrote more than 600 opinions. In 1994, at a dinner to honor Justice Peters, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that Justice Peters “gave generations of women law students a reason to believe they, too, could aspire and achieve.”