File Under: h

Born in 1938 in Forrest City, Arkansas, Manuel Hughes received his B.A. in 1965 from the University of Missouri at Columbia. His work has been exhibited at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He is largely a still life painter, and his first series of paintings contained images of draped fabrics. In the late 1980s he began to paint still lifes of household objects he had collected over many years. Hughes focuses on the details of the objects and formal relationships between the pieces in each arrangement. In his straightforward portrayal of tools and other mundane items set against nondescript backgrounds, the artist asks the viewer to share in the pleasure he takes in each quirky and unique form.

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

www.manuelhughes.com/

Lou Horner was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1954. She holds a B.A. from George Peabody College in Nashville. Her work has been shown at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C., the Charles A. Wustum Museum in Racine, Wisconsin, and at galleries in Tennessee. In the late 1980s Horner became intrigued with the shape of saws; since then she has produced paintings on wood cut into saw shapes. Her figurative imagery represents a personal kaleidoscope of the memories, desires, hopes, and fears that result from everyday experience.

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

Colonel Harry J. Holt (c.1915-1987) was a native of Washington, DC, and lived in Bethesda, MD, until retiring to Lake Placid, Florida. During World War II he served in the U.S. Air Force, where he was eventually promoted to colonel, and later served as post-commander of the Disabled American Veterans. Colonel Holt made miniature tools—such as a diesel hammer, chisel, or monkey wrench—out of sterling silver and ironwood.

Linda Hoffman received a B.A. in Fine Arts from Bryn Mawr College. She also studied at the Japanese Noh Theater in Kyoto, Japan, the Ecole Jacques Locoq, International School of Masks, Movement and Theater in Paris France, and La Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France.

Linda Hoffman works with old tools, barn boards, tree trunks, shells, bones; materials she finds in the New England landscape. Her gift is in her appreciation of these objects. She seems to have a total trust in their inherent qualities and in her ability to transform them with a natural wonder and aesthetic purpose.

Hoffman's latest sculpture combines bronze figures with elements from the landscape - stones and branches - or old tools - such as wheels and gears.

"In this new work, my focus is on the human being as present in an environment. I sculpt a figure to inhabit a particular old tool, tree branch or stone. The figure is kinesthetically present, actively involved in a movement - whether sitting in meditation, balancing from a ring or walking on a rusty gear." LH

www.lindahoffman.com/

Werner Hoeflich was born in 1957 in Eugene, Oregon. He received his B.F.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1979. Hoeflich has been awarded two scholarships from the University of Colorado and has received the Sean Driscoll award. His work has been exhibited in several solo and group shows, including solo exhibitions in the United States and France. Hoeflich began painting tools in 1984, and his fascination with the subject continues; tools and hardware form the basis for many of his painterly explorations. Although the tools remain recognizable, they are often shown from unusual angles, thus altering the viewer's perception of these mundane objects. The artist depicts the tools against painterly, non-objective backgrounds, which bring to the fore the tension between the surface and the subject of the work.

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

Born in 1943 in Bridgehampton, New Jersey, Charles Hobson received a B.A. from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1965, an L.L.B from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, in 1968, and a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1988. Hobson's work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad in Japan, Russia, and Hungary. His works are included in collections such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, and the British Library, London, England. He uses the monotype primarily as an underpainting or sketch upon which he builds his images with pastel and graphite. In the late 1980s Hobson explored the theme of tools in a series of monotypes.

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

After studying at the Penland School of Crafts, North Carolina, Robert Herhusky earned a B.S. from California State University at Chico in 1981 and an M.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1985. Herhusky has been an instructor at California State University, the California College of Arts and Crafts, and the Pilchuck Glass School, Washington. His work has been exhibited at the Sierra Nevada Museum, Reno, and in Japan. He has completed a large-scale commission for the San Francisco Airport.

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

Tony Hepburn was born in Manchester, England, in 1942. He received degrees from the Camberwell College of Art in 1963 and London University in 1965. His work has been exhibited internationally, including shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the American Craft Museum, New York, and the Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C. He received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. Hepburn made sculptures combining found objects and clay elements that were often interpretations—or "evocations"—of objects that intrigued him. His earliest works were large-scale sculpted gates and totems, and in the mid-1980s he began a series of rural elegiac allegories based on the environment and people of upstate New York, where he resided. Hepburn died January 5, 2015.

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

Tracy Heneberger was born in New London, Connecticut in 1954, grew up in Brazil, and earned his B.A. in 1978 from New York University.  His sculpture and drawing have been shown extensively in the U.S. as well as Norway and China.  After 1996, his work shifted towards organic abstraction and reflected an increasing consideration of fragments in relation to larger forms.  He was fascinated by the humble yet wondrous design of commercial, mass-produced hardware.  A corrugated nail or copper banding becomes the repeated building blocks within the restrictions of a rigorous geometry.  Deeply poetic and richly textured, the finished works belie their industrial origins and their labor-intensive creation.  Often they were inspired by poetry and autobiography.  Watchtower, for example, is loosely drawn on the stooped figure of an elderly man that the artist could see from his studio window, while evoking a fortress or a lookout.  Heneberger experimented with single casting during foundries residencies in China, especially the ability of molten metal to unify an object while preserving characteristics of individual elements.  The Japanese concept of wabi, or the beauty of subtle imperfections, pulses through these works, sometimes the results of change, and at others, of choices made during the process.  Here as elsewhere, a sense of life and grace emanates from their idiosyncratic forms. Heneberger died February 28, 2015.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by International Arts & Artists. Edited to reflect the artist’s passing

www.tracyheneberger.com/

Helma Rogge Rehders was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1942, and has lived in England, Zambia, and in the Canadian province of Manitoba at Winnipeg Beach, where she currently resides. Rehders first developed an interest in art in the 1970s during her five years in Africa, where she taught drawing and painting. After moving to Canada, she received her BFA Honours in 1987 from the University of Manitoba School of Art, and now owns the H. RogueRaiders Studio Gallery, located in Winnipeg Beach. Rehders has received awards in both painting and poetry, including the Prairie Ocean Lunar Award (2007), numerous Manitoba Art Council awards, and first place in the Winnipeg Free Press/Writers collective poetry contest. Her art explores themes inspired by her natural surroundings in Manitoba Interlake, as she has explained: “In my painting and my writing I give homage to the landscape and the wonderful life we live here. Out my window I can see a snowy landscape of the creek, the marsh, and high spruce trees. I find it inspiring.”