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Ellen Gibson received a B.A. in art history from Boston University, and a M.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art in Sculpture. She is inspired by simplistic lines with deep messages, and she tends to use materials such as wood, steel, copper and rope to integrate ideas of manufacturing into her work. She greatly focuses on tools, and their ability to create other tools. In fact, she wants to celebrate tools and their utilitarian nature throughout the world. She has been involved in exhibitions throughout the United States, and she has taught at Massachusetts College of the Art.

Paul Gibson was born in Los Angeles, CA, in 1957, and has worked as a San Francisco-based artist since 1989. Gibson’s art education and inspiration began by watching his mother—an immigrant from Paraguay, of whom Gibson has said that “her artistic purity lives inside of me”—decorate wedding cakes. He received a full scholarship from the Art Academy of Design (National Academy of Design) in New York, NY (1987), a BFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA (1984), and studied architecture at the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA (1980). He continued in academia by teaching drawing for over 18 years at the Academy of Art College, San Francisco.  Gibson works mainly in pastels and acrylic, and states that, “I am a painter of spatial ambiguity, picture plane, perceptual perspective and representation of space, creating pictures from the art of history.” His artworks have been exhibited widely, including at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco; the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art; and in numerous private collections. Gibson is a collector of art as well, with over 150 works by Lucian Freud, Käthe Kollwitz, John Sloan, and many others.

Aristotle Georgiades was born in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1955, and currently lives in Stoughton, WI, where since 1993 he has been a professor of art and sculpture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Georgiades received his BFA from the University of Michigan in sculptures and metals, and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He uses wood, metal, and recycled architectural material for his (often) human scale sculptural works, which center on themes of class, male identity, and labor economics. Georgiades has exhibited his sculptural works nationally and internationally in both curated group and solo exhibitions. In addition to his own work, he and his wife Gail Simpson have formed their own company (Actual Size Artworks), and collaboratively create large site-specific sculptures. Georgiades’s works have been reviewed in various leading publications, including Art in America, Sculpture magazine, and the Chicago Tribune. In 2014 he was awarded the prestigious International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Educator Award.

Steve Geiger was born in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, in 1956. He studied at Bucks County Community College in 1986-88 and the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1988-90. The sculptor's work was first exhibited at OK Harris Gallery in New York in 1991. Using found objects and natural materials, Geiger explores the transformation of materials into objects.

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

Born in 1952 in Newark, New Jersey, Walter Garde received his B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited at the University of Richmond, as well as the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He has received a fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The artist began a series of tool paintings in the early 1980s.

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