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Hugh R. Butt was born in Delhaven, North Carolina, in 1910.  He earned his B.A. from the University of Minnesota and his M.D. from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1933. A doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Butt was also a self-taught artist who created metal sculptures. In the 1980s he made a series of sculptures using antique tools he had collected. The artist wrote that this group of sculptures “signifies my belief that it sometimes takes a long time before tools find their proper usefulness.” He died in Minnesota in 2008.

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

Ken Butler was born in Bethesda, MD, in 1948, and currently lives in New York City. Butler studied at Colorado College, the Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence (France), and Portland State University, where he received his MFA in painting.  He is most famous for building experimental (“hybrid”) musical instruments, employing a bricolage method of using whatever is at hand. He constructed his first hybrid instrument in 1978 by combining a small hatchet, a contact microphone, and other materials, which he then played as a violin. Since then, he has constructed over 400 hybrid instruments, often from such prosaic objects as a snow shovel, hockey stick, golf club, toy handgun, or rocking-chair leg. Not only have his instruments been exhibited at major museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Stedelijk Museum, but he also performs his instruments at festivals and clubs, and has even appeared on The Tonight Show and played with the Tonight Show Band. In creating these unusual instruments, many of which are unplayable, Butler claims that they are “attempts to reveal hidden meanings and associations, momentarily creating a striking and re-animated cultural identity for common objects.”

Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1945, James Butler received a B.S. from the University of Nebraska at Omaha in 1967 and an M.F.A. from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 1970. He has taught printmaking at Southern Illinois University and Illinois State University. Butler's work has been included in exhibitions of prints and drawings at numerous galleries and at the Minneapolis Museum of Art, St. Paul, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Butler's drawings and prints focus on surreal portrayals of everyday scenes, in which common objects are often depicted in unusual settings.

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

Jim Burkholder was born in Albany, NY, in 1949, and currently lives in Arlington, VA. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the Washington, DC, area, including at Ellipse Arts Center, Arlington, VA; the WPA Auction Show – Invitational, Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, DC; the traveling group show Photosensitive; and a 12-artist group exhibition at the Athenaeum entitled Words and Letters. Burkholder works primarily in photography, and received the Three Rivers Art Festival Leonard Shugar Award for best black and white photograph. The Washington Post reviewed Burkholder’s work and praised him for his digital photo illustrations.

Thai Bui, a native of Hanoi, Vietnam, studied at the City College of San Francisco and earned a B.F.A from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1988, followed by an M.F.A. from Stanford University in 1992. He was awarded the Skowhegan Scholarship from the School of Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine. Bui works primarily in steel but also incorporates other materials in his pieces, including rocks, wood, copper, and tools. Often small-scale, his work is highly detailed but playful.

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

Beverly Buchanan was born on October 8, 1940 in Fuquay, North Carolina. She is an African American artist famous for utilizing her art to communicate a Southern vernacular to the world. Buchanan graduated with a B.A. in medical technology from Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina before attending Columbia University to receive her M.A. in parasitology. She forwent medical school to focus on her art, and enrolled in a class at the Art Students League. Norman Lewis was her teacher but she developed a close relationship with Romare Bearden. She has received multiple awards for her efforts to further women in the arts, and now maintains two studios: one in Athens, Georgia and the other in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

www.beverlybuchanan.com/

Born in 1932 in Geneva, Switzerland, Emilie Brzezinski grew up in Berkeley, California, and completed her B.A. at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, in 1953.  She received a scholarship to Boston Museum School, Massachusetts, in 1954 and completed a one year apprenticeship at Atelier du Feu in 1956.  She started her art career in the 1970s with a series of solo shows in Washington, D.C. and New York.  Working in a variety of media, including resin, latex, wood fiber, and wood, her expressive themes always relate to nature.  Eventually she focused entirely on monumental wood sculpture, using chainsaws and axes to carve forms that took inspiration from the wood she found at mills, gardens, and development sites.  In the last two decades she has exhibited in the United States and Eastern Europe, particularly in the Czech Republic where her family is from.

www.thelureoftheforest.com/

Gillian Brown was born in Manchester, NH, in 1951. She received her BA from Brown University, her MAE from Rhode Island School of Design, and her MFA in photography from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has since been honored with multiple awards and grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a one-year fellowship from Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. Her work has been exhibited widely, and to much acclaim, at institutions such as the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Her art is also in the collections of multiple museums and galleries, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Seattle Art Museum. Working with video, photography, and paintings and drawings, Brown explores complex ideas about perception, reality, and consciousness. She currently resides in an ecovillage in Fairfield, Iowa, and teaches as an adjunct assistant professor of art at Maharishi University.

Charlie Brouwer was born in Holland, Michigan in 1946. Brouwer received a B.A in English from Grand Valley State University in Michigan, and went on to study art at Portland State University in Oregon. After finishing there, Charlie Brouwer moved back to Michigan where he received an M.A in Painting and an M.F. A in Sculpture from Western Michigan University. Since finishing his degrees, Brouwer has taught at the high school and university levels, retiring in 2008 from Radford University in Virginia. Brouwer has shown at galleries and art centers throughout the United States and in Hungary and Poland. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Art Museum of the Americas Organization of American States, Washington, D.C., and the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, Racine, Wisconsin. His work is in the McDonalds’ Corporation Collection, the UpJohn Corporation Collection, the Notoro Collection of International Contemporary Art, Poland, and the International Outdoor Wood Sculpture Park, Nagyatad, Hungary. Brouwer employs a visual vocabulary of natural and artificial objects, including tools, as metaphors to express larger spiritual truths.

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

www.charliebrouwer.com/

Richard Bronk received a B.S. at the University of Wisconsin at Strout, and since, has had solo exhibitions at the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, Madison, and Mount Mary University, Milwaukee.  His work has been exhibited at the Milwaukee Art Museum and at the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, Racine, Wisconsin.  Bronk’s work is included in the collection of the City of Milwaukee.  The artist’s preferred medium is wood, and his humorous, chaotic, organic and abstract hand-carved sculptures are often visual and verbal puns based on common expressions and phrases.

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

www.bronkart.com/furniture.html