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David Suter was born in Bethesda, Maryland in 1949. His father was a bureaucrat who worked in Washington D.C., but his mother was an artist. Suter was drafted into the Army and was stationed in Germany. Upon returning to Washington D.C., David Suter got a job working as a courtroom artist during the Watergate trials. His drawings appeared in the Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, and other publications, with his style becoming well known enough that his illustrations were known as “suterisms”. Suter now lives in Amagansett, New York with his wife and three daughters.

James Surls was born in Terrel, Texas, in 1943.  He holds a B.S. from Sam Houston State College in Huntsville, Texas.  He studied with Julius Schmidt at Cranbook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he received an M.F.A. in 1969.  Since catching the eye of the art world in the 1970s with his tree-creature sculptures that combined folk-art traditions with surrealist overtones, Surls has become recognized as a leading contemporary sculptor and has had numerous museum exhibitions throughout the United States.  He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1979 and was honored as the Texas Artist of the Year in 1991.  His work can be found in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, the Seattle Art Museum, Washington, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas.  Manipulating various native woods with hand and power tools, Surls creates fetishistic, anthropomorphizing imagery that celebrates the force of nature and is inspired in part by Southwest Native American and Mexican cultures.  He also has collaborated with poet Robert Creeley on a series of prints that combines poems and images.

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

www.jamessurls.com/

Roy Superior was born in New York in 1934.  He earned his B.F.A. in illustration from the Pratt Institute, New York, in 1956 and completed his M.F.A. in painting and printmaking from Yale University in 1962.  Superior’s small-scale machine constructions have been included in gallery and craft exhibitions throughout the United States, including shows at the American Craft Museum, New York; “New Art Forms,” an exhibition in Chicago; and “American Craft at the Armory.”  He has been awarded several grants from Hampshire College and was a Massachusetts Foundation for the Arts sculpture finalist.  His highly detailed miniaturized machines offer social commentary, reflecting the absurdity of some of contemporary society’s technological advances that seek to relieve individuals from the necessity of performing even the most basic tasks.  Superior’s witty and ingenious constructions combine skilled craftsmanship with references to tools and machines of earlier periods in history.

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

roysuperior.com/

Evan Summer was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1948. He earned a B.S. in chemistry from the State University of New York at Cortland in 1970, a B.F.A. from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1973, and an M.F.A. in printmaking from Yale University in 1975. Summer has taught at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. His work has been exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress, and is included in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the National Museum of American Art. Summer's depictions of piled objects and jumbled environments, abstractions of light and dark, are vehicles for formal explorations of pictorial space, volume, and texture.

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

Frank H. Stack was born in Houston, Texas in 1937. Stack received a B.F.A. from the University of Texas in Austin and an M.F.A. from University of Wyoming. While in college, Stack was the editor of the Texas Ranger student humor magazine. While working in the bible belt for many years, Stack used an alias, Foolbert Sturgeon, to avoid persecution for his cartoons. He wrote an underground comicbook, “The Adventures of Jesus” after graduating from University of Texas, and held a professorship at the University of Missouri for forty years before retiring in 2003.

Jeff Spaulding was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1947. He received a B.A. from Central Michigan University in 1970 and an M.F.A. in 1974 from Pennsylvania State University. Since the mid-1970s he has received several awards and has exhibited his work at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In his early sculptures and drawings Spaulding explored the energy and movement of objects, including hammers. Around 1984 he began using trees—cedars and firs, which he gathers every summer in the woods of northern Michigan, and discarded Christmas trees—as his primary medium. His recent indoor and outdoor installations of trees probe the subject's primal life force while playing with viewer expectations. Intensely physical in their creation, his organic abstract images also serve as a lyrical metaphor for the human condition.

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

Rico Solinas was born in Oakland, California, in 1954.  After studying at the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C. in 1970-72, he received his B.A. in art from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1977, and his M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1988.  Solinas’ figurative and landscape paintings and prints have been exhibited in Ecuador, Mexico, and California.  In 1987-88 he painted a series of landscapes with trucks on saw blades, playing against the bucolic images most often associated with the genre of saw paintings.

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

Edgar Soberón was born in Cienfuegos, Cuba in 1962.  He studied at Parsons School of Design in New York where he received his B.F.A. in 1987.  He was awarded the Brunschwig and Fils Scholarship to study abroad at Parsons and the American College in Paris, France and Sienna, Italy in 1986.  Since then his work has been published, collected and exhibited nationally and internationally.  Soberón had his first solo exhibition in 1998 at the Associated American Artists gallery in New York City.  He has participated in numerous exhibitions since, including two important still life survey exhibitions: Silent Things Secret Things, Still Life from Rembrandt to the Millennium, Albuquerque Museum of Art, Albuquerque, New Mexico and Reflections of Time and Place, Latin American Still Life in The 20th Century, Katonah Museum Of Art, Katonah, New York, and El Barrio Museum, New York City, New York.  Soberón joined the faculty at Parsons School of Design in 1992 where he later taught Drawing Fundamentals and Printmaking with the Foundation and Fine Arts programs until 2002.  In 1996 the New School University and Parsons School of Design recognized Soberón with the distinguished Teaching Excellence Award for his outstanding contributions in art education.  In 2002, Soberón decided to relocate his studio to central Mexico. He presently lives and works in the town of San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato.

www.esoberon.com/