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Kaisa Puustak was born in Tallinn, Estonia, in 1945, where she has remained as an artist and printmaker. Puustak comes from a family of artists; her grandfather was a stone craftsman, her mother and aunt are both porcelain artists, and her husband is a graphic artist. She studied graphic arts at the State Art Institute (Estonian Academy of Arts), graduating in 1963, and continued in academia as a professor of graphic arts at the State Art Institute, where she served as dean of the Department of Fine Arts. Commercially, she designs posters and postcards, as well as illustrating children’s books. She particularly focuses on still-life prints, drawings, and paperworks, which have been shown internationally in such countries as Russia, Finland, and Australia, as well as in the permanent collections of the Art Museum of Tallinn in Tartu, Estonia; the University of New Orleans; and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany. Puustak has received numerous honors, including the Vilnius 1981 year’s printmaker, the Stabilo Prize for Children Books, and awards for her illustrations for Seto fairytales.

Maria Porges was born in Oakland, California in 1954.  She completed her B.A. in art history at Yale University in 1975, and in 1979 she earned her M.F.A. in sculpture and drawing from the University of Chicago.  She also attended Grinnell College in Iowa, and the San Francisco Art Institute.  She has exhibited her sculptures, drawings, prints, and ceramics widely, including shows in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, California, Reno, Nevada, and New York.  Porges is a frequent contributing editor to several art publications and was curator of the traveling exhibition “The New Narratology: Examining the Narrative in Image/Text Art.”  Irony and postmodernism come together in Porges’ work, where the recurring themes of tools and books serve as metaphors for knowledge.  At times narrative and at other times conceptual, her imagery plays with the inherent meaning, association, and structure of her found objects.  Her titles often explore the inverse – the idea of words and languages as tools.

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

www.mariaporges.com/

Clayton Pond was born in Long Island, New York, in 1941.  He received a B.F.A. from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1961 and an M.F.A. from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York in 1966.  His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City, and the Delaware Museum of Art, Wilmington.  His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, and the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.  As a second-generation Pop artist, Pond uses a great deal of high-energy color in his paintings and his prints, often outlining his objects in contrasting colors.  He is interested in recording the obsessions and possessions of Americans.  His early prints were close-up depictions of domestic objects such as toasters, telephones, and toilet seats; a later series involved leisure activities, humorously depicting people golfing and skiing.  His most recent pieces are large-scale constructions of high-tech machines and printing presses.

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

claytonpond.com/

Leah Poller was born in Pennsylvania in 1942. She attended Dade Junior College in Miami, Florida receiving an Associate’s Degree in Fine Arts before moving to Paris to study sculpture at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts. After returning to New York City in 1992, Poller began her most well-known project, 101 Beds. Leah Poller has had her work displayed in countless galleries and institutions all over the world, and now gives lectures to the greater art community regarding curating, expression and management of art. She has also been featured on Fox television and CNN, and has been mentioned in multiple publications.

Christopher Plowman was born in Hampshire, England, in 1952 and died in 2009. He received a diploma in art and design from Wolverhampton Polytechnic in Wolverhampton, England, in 1973, and an M.A. from the Royal College of Art, London, in 1976. His work has been exhibited in Europe and the United States and is in the collections of the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Arts Council of Great Britain, and the New York Public Library. He has taught in Britain and at the University of Houston. Plowman works in a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. In the 1980s he produced an extensive series of still life sculptures and prints about tools. In many of the prints, Plowman uses the objects to define the pictorial space, filling the compositions so that the image expands visually into the viewer's space, calling to mind a jumble of tools in an overflowing toolbox.

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

Michael Rocco Pinciotti was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1950.  After completing his B.A. from the University of Toledo, Pinciotti moved to New York where he received his M.F.A. in printmaking from the Pratt Institute.  At that time he also began designing at Let There Be Neon, where he worked for five years.  Today he is internationally recognized as a major neon artist.   His work has been exhibited in Europe, South America, and throughout the United States.  He has taught and given guest lectures in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Argentina.  At times humorous and always provocative, his art combines neon with drawing, photography, and found natural materials.  His multilayered, mixed-media constructions, which often refer to architectural elements, houses, temples, and birds’ nests, address the poetry of place and the anatomy of spirituality.

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

Carlos Raul Perez was born in Los Angeles in 1953. He apprenticed in photography under Norman Frimkess and later worked at the Elson-Alexander Studio as a portrait photographer. Perez is also a self-taught painter. In 1973 he started painting commissioned portraits based on photographic studies. He gradually began to experiment with colors, textures, and perspectives. His recent studies of people or still life objects strike a balance between realist representation and mystical impressionism. Perez’s work has been exhibited throughout California and is included in collections throughout the state.

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

Christopher Pelley was born in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1955, and raised in New England. Although a New York City-based artist, Pelley also divides his time between Rome and Beijing. An avid traveler from an early age, Pelley dropped out of high school to travel across India; after returning to school, he studied at Syracuse University and at Arizona State University, where he received his BFA summa cum laude. His work has been exhibited in the United States, Budapest, and Beijing, and can be seen in numerous permanent collections, such as the Shangyuan Art Museum in Beijing and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC. Many of Pelley’s paintings and mixed-media works reflect his experiences abroad as well as his fascination with myth, memory, history, and nostalgia. In Rome, Pelley taught as a visiting professor at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture Rome Program, and as an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico Rome Program. In Beijing, Pelley curates exhibitions at the Gallery Projects, which showcases contemporary art by emerging Chinese artists.

Laura Peery was born in Washington, D.C in 1952 and received her M.F.A. from George Washington University. Peery never intended to specialize in creating teapots, but as her work evolved, she focused her creativity into this iconic artifact. She originally wanted her designs to be functional interpretations. However, she soon realized that to truly embrace her art, she must ignore utilitarian aspects such as the spout and lid. Laura has participated in multiple group and solo exhibitions throughout the United States, and has her work included in the collections of Northeastern University, Massachusetts, Kamm Teapot Collection, Florida, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

laurapeeryporcelain.com/home.html

Brian Paulsen was born in 1941. He received his B.A. from the University of Washington and an M.F.A. from Washington State University. Paulsen appreciates the odors and sounds of tools because of his father’s studio that he spent much time in as a child. When creating still lifes, Brian prefers focusing on the culture that created the object rather than the object itself. Paulsen creates collages by assembling found objects to create a new object entirely. The artist also incorporates visual and word games into his art. He prefers watercolor, as it dries quickly and has an interesting color composition. His work has toured the United States and is in collections including the Springfield Museum of Art, Missouri, University of Richmond Museum, Virginia, and the North Dakota Museum of Art.