File Under: f

David Furman, a ceramic artist, was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1945. He received his B.A. from the University of Oregon in 1969 and his M.F.A. from the University of Washington in 1972. Furman is director of Studio Arts program at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, as well as a professor of art at Claremont Graduate School. His work has been exhibited nationally in numerous gallery and museum shows. He has been awarded two Fulbright Senior Artist Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Interdisciplinary Fellowship. Furman creates trompe l'oeil ceramic sculptures of ordinary objects, such as bulletin boards and paintbrushes, which form part of an ongoing series.

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

Robert Fried was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1937. A child art prodigy, he was accepted at age 11 by the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he took classes in drawing. In college he studied graphic art, receiving his associate degree from the New York City Community College, his BA from Cooper Union, and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Beyond his formal education, he was an assistant for Robert Motherwell, received a Fulbright scholarship and grant (for printmaking) from the National Endowment for the Arts, and participated in a residency at the Simon Fraser University near Vancouver, BC. Fried is best known for the flamboyant posters he created for psychedelic rock concerts during San Francisco’s Summer of Love. His last project was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Art (now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); he and five other artists were asked to travel to Baja California for a month and produce artworks visually evocative of their trip. The night before the exhibition’s reception, Fried died of a stroke in Redwood City, CA, at the age of 37.

Thomas Freund was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1944. He joined the United States Navy in 1962, and then received his B.A. from Columbia College in New York City. Freund is a self-employed woodworker living in New Mexico. His art has been a part of exhibitions all over the United States and tends toward the Dadaist and Surrealist movements; it also has a whimsical unique quality.

Hilary French was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1958. She received her B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1980 and her M.F.A. in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, 1989. She has exhibited her photographs in galleries in Boston and elsewhere. Through her work, which includes photograms and photography combined with other media such as relief casts, French explores the boundary between the actual object and its image.

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

Joel C. Freid was born in 1946 in Lampertheim, Germany, and currently lives in Bethesda, MD. He received his BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology, with a major in photographic illustration and a minor in lithography and art. Freid is a much-admired photographer whose work is in numerous collections.

Ke Francis was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1945.  He studied at the Memphis Academy of Arts from 1964 to 1967 and earned his B.F.A. from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1969. Francis works in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking (particularly woodcuts), and photography, and often combines several media in a single installation. He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant. His work has been exhibited at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. His profoundly narrative works seem to translate the Southern oral tradition into visual terms. In 1980 Francis began working on the “Reconstruction” series, which depicts the destruction wrought by tornadoes and the rebuilding that goes on afterward. His idiosyncratic style – part Cubist, part “primitive” – and his particular vocabulary of images, including the circular saw, combine to create quirky yet heroic paeans to the human spirit.

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

Hans Godo Fräbel was born in Jena, East Germany in 1941.  He studied scientific glassblowing at Jena Glaswerke and took art classes at the Mainzer Kunstschule in Mainz, Germany.  In 1965 he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where he attended the Georgia Institute of Technology.  In 1968 he established the Fräbel Studio in Atlanta.  Today he is recognized as one of the world’s leading glass artists.  He has done commissions for Absolut Vodka, the Carter Center, the Corning Museum of Glass, and the Smithsonian Institution, among others.  Fräbel’s delicate and innovative sculptural compositions begin with heated borosilcate rods that are shaped with a hot lamp or by hand.  His subjects, often rendered at life-size scale, encompass the human figure, tools, birds, flowers, and water droplets.

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

www.frabel.com/about/hans-godo-frabel

Pierre Flandreau was born in Panama in 1948. He received a B.A. from the College of Marin, Kentfield, California, and also studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Flandreau is primarily a painter, but he began to work with bronze in the mid-1980s. Many of the materials in his sculptures are found objects—natural materials or artificial items—which he juxtaposes in his explorations of the relationship of man to his environment.

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

Susan Firestone was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1946.  She received her B.A. from Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.  She continued her studies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.  In 1973 she received her M.F.A. in painting at the American University, Washington, D.C., and she attended the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1977.  She has exhibited widely and has studios in New York and Washington, D.C.  Firestone works in painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking, and her materials – from transformers and auto parts to saw blades and tarot cards – hint at her idiosyncratic blend of Eastern mysticism and Western materialism.  Firestone sees the artist as a craftsperson in contemporary society and tools as the artifacts of today.  Her dreamy images often incorporate pictographs and electronically timed sequences of word variations.  The goddess as muse and augur is a common motif, and since 2001 she has been making plaster and bronze casts of the human form.  Her work, which includes Pop Art elements and pays homage to Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, is also marked by a distinctly poetic approach.

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

Howard Finster was born in Valley Head, Alabama, in 1916, and lived on his three-acre home, called Paradise Garden, in Pennville, Georgia, until his death in 2001.  He experienced visions from the age of three and was a revivalist Baptist preacher for forty years in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee.  He received his calling to paint “sacred art” in 1976, when he was retouching a bicycle and a splash of white paint on his finger transformed into a vision.  He went on to create thousands of evangelically patriotic, religious, and heroic paintings and sculptures. His work has been exhibited widely, including shows at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of American Folk Art and the Paine-Webber Gallery in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California.  In 1984 he was included in the United States exhibition at the Venice Biennale.  His riotous images, which combine every kind of graphic medium, include “primitive” portraits of such American icons as Elvis Presley, George Washington, and John Kennedy, as well as biblical quotations and texts from his own fiery wisdom.  Tools held a particular fascination for Finster, who considered them the hallmark of civilization and the key to winning the American West.

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

www.finster.com/