File Under: A

Yuri Avvakumov was born in Tiraspol, Moldova (then a part of the USSR), in 1957. He graduated from the Moscow Architecture Institute in 1981. Avvakumov is a sculptor, a printmaker, and a practicing architect with his own firm, AGITARACH Studio, in Moscow. His work has been exhibited at the State Museums of Moscow and of St. Petersburg, the Palazzo dell'Arte, Milan, and the Fondation pour l'Architecture, Brussels. He has been influenced by the Russian avant-garde artists of the 1920s such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ljubov Popova, and Konstantin Melnikov. Ladders and exposed stairwells are recurring themes in both his art and his architectural designs. For Avvakumov, ladders are carriers of meaning, becoming temporary monuments, symbols of construction and progress, or barricades.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Hammer Head, 1984
Watercolor on Paper, 23 1/2" x 30 1/4"

Graham Ashton was born at Wirral, Cheshire, England, in 1948. He earned his B.A. in fine art from the Coventry School of Art in 1970. Ashton's work has been exhibited in galleries and art spaces in England, Ireland, Australia, and the United States. He lives in London and spends part of each year in the United States. Ashton works in a variety of media, including oils and watercolor. His treatment of oil paint and watercolor are similar: he lays down washes of thinned paint, building up layers that float across the canvas or paper. Among his influences are such postwar American painters as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, as well as mid-nineteenth-century practitioners of the English watercolor tradition.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Bill Arnold was born on November 28, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York. He received his B.A. from San Francisco State College in 1963, and received a M.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. Arnold sees his role as an artist as finding the beauty in everyday experiences and capturing them with the lens of a camera. This mentality was popular in the 1970s, when Arnold worked with artists such as Tom Zimmermann, Christian Sunde, Steve Smith, Ingeborg Gerdes, Dennis Hearne, Elaine Mayes, and Jerry Burchard to embrace the allure of the everyday world. Bill Arnold was extremely influenced by new technologies in photography, such as the Itek reading and printing machine he uncovered in 1970 at a public library. Not only did Arnold use this machine for his own work, but he also utilized the new technology in his classroom as a professor, creating a more interactive environment for his students. Bill Arnold displays the wonder of the world through his art, and inspires other to celebrate their day to day experiences. He has received many honors such as a National Endowment for the Arts grant and his work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Born in Nice, France, in 1928 and died in New York in 2005, Armand Fernandez gave up his surname in youthful emulation of Van Gogh, and in 1957 he became Arman when a typesetter dropped the “d” from his name.  A founding member of New Realism with artists Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely and theorist Pierre Restany, Arman continues to be one of the most innovative and provocative artists of our time.  His formal training included studies at the National School of Decorative Arts in Nice and the Louvre School in Paris.  He took up residence in New York in 1963, becoming friends with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella.  Around 1960 he began creating his now world-famous “destructions” (poubelles), and “accumulations.”  His “accumulations,” or constructions, have incorporated such ordinary objects as vice grips, saws, shoe trees, and wrenches, as well as scrapped industrial goods, broken bicycles, and discarded phonograph records, which he composes into broad, allover patterns.  His work has been shown throughout the world, including the Venice Biennale and Documenta.

www.armanstudio.com

Born in 1962, Dale Alward earned his B.F.A. in sculpture, video, and film production from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, in 1984. While working on his degree at R.I.S.D., Alward also studied semiotics at Brown University, and glass techniques at Ohio State University. Alward's work has been exhibited at several art centers, including the Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, D.C., the Montpelier Cultural Arts Center, Maryland, and Strathmore Hall Arts Center, Rockville, Maryland. In his work Alward sets up visual comparisons between completed images and preparatory sketches, between finished areas of painting and raw materials. Through these juxtapositions, he asks the viewer to participate in the manipulation of the subject matter and to mediate on the process of image-making.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Born in New York City in 1907, Altina studied art in Europe and in the United States with George Grosz and Rico Le Brun, among others. Her early work was in industrial design. She assisted Salvador Dalí in dressing windows on New York's Fifth Avenue in the 1940s and designed eyewear for Harlequin, for which she received a National Design Award. Upon moving to California, she created Interregnum, a film based on drawings by George Grosz; it won the first prize at the Venice Biennale film festival and received an Academy Award nomination in 1961. During this period she also received several mural commissions, including one for the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. In the late 1960s Altina began making fantasy furniture called "Chairacters"--sculpted figurative works that function as benches and chairs. She drew inspiration for these pieces from Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographs of empty chairs, which seemed to evoke their departed sitters. Her first solo exhibition, at the McKenzie Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1967, featured her chairs. The artist also developed a series of "portrait chairs" with faces cast from life masks of her sitters. She continued to make fantasy furniture after moving to Washington, D.C., in 1974. Produced in multiples, mainly in fiberglass, her pieces are often finished to simulate other materials such as terra-cotta or stone. They recall the more intimate aspects of certain periods of ancient Greek and Roman art. Altina died in 1999 in Sante Fe, New Mexico.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Peter Arthur Alsberg was born in 1960, and died in 2001 at the age of 41. A New York native, he grew up in Englewood and Tenafly, N.J. After graduating from the University of Maryland in 1982, he spent several years doing freelance illustration work, including sketching legumes for the Agriculture Department. Mr. Alsberg also did illustrations for The Fearless Frying Cookbook, published by Workman in 1997, and freelance work for Business Week and Macworld magazines. He was the art director of The Washington Post’s Outlook section.

Born in 1952 in Arizona, Allan Adams earned his B.A. from California State College, Stanislaus, California in 1975 followed by an M.F.A. from the University of California at Davis in 1978.  His works have been exhibited at notable institutions such as the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.  Creating sculptures in wood, Adams renders highly detailed, illusionistic objects that are traditionally manufactured from other materials. To remind the viewer that his works are sculptures, not merely replicas of utilitarian objects, he leaves them unpainted and unstained.  His pieces are characterized by fine detail and a masterful use of scale.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Berenice Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898 and died in 1991 in her home in Monson, Maine.  After studying at Ohio State University, she went to New York in 1918 with the intention of becoming a journalist but redirected her efforts into sculpture.  She moved to Paris in 1921 to continue her sculpture studies in the studio of the modernist legend Constantin Brâncuși.  When Man Ray hired her to be his darkroom assistant in 1923, her focus began to shift into making her own photographs. Between 1926 and 1929 she expanded her oeuvre with a series of photographic portraits highlighting the world of the Parisian avant-garde intelligentsia, including James Joyce, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau. Upon returning to New York in 1929, Abbott turned her lens towards the bustling city and its diverse inhabitants. From 1935 to 1939 she produced extensive photographic documentation of the city, culminating in the book Changing New York (1939).  She thought of the camera as an instrument of truth, attempting an objective description of the external world. With intricately detailed images of everyday scenes, Abbott asserted the photographs ability to state unadulterated truths.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Chester Arnold was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1952. He received his B.A. from the College of Marin, Kentfield, California, and went on to earn his M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, California, in 1987. Arnold has had regular solo exhibitions at galleries in California since 1979. He has taught classes in drawing and painting at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute. Arnold’s representational paintings explore different themes in various series. His work is filled with references to other art, including figures or settings from historical paintings. In the late 1980s Arnold did a series of tool “portraits,” structured similarly to Renaissance portraits, with the sitter in the foreground and a distant landscape in the background. Many of these paintings showed building frameworks, construction activities, or fires, suggesting continual cycles of creation and destruction.

Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.