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Richard Kelly Tipping was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1949 and received his B.A from Flinders University. His PhD from the University of Technology Sydney (2007) is titled Word Art Works: visual poetry and textual objects. He was guest editor for Artlink magazine’s special issue Word as Art in 2007 (see www.artlink.com.au). He has published five books of poetry and held over twenty solo exhibitions in Australia, Europe and the USA. His most recent sculptures (2007) are metaphysical poems inscribed into large basalt crystals. His art-poem signs are available in gallery shops internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London. He has three children, and currently lectures in media arts in the School of Design, Communication and IT at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He continues to explore the physical qualities of written language, making art with words and getting poetry off the page and into the streets.

Jean Tinguely was born in Fribourg, Switzerland, in 1925 and died in Bern, Switzerland, in 1991.  Though Tinguely was best known for his whimsical motorized constructions, he was also a painter, a draftsman, and a designer of stage sets.   From 1941 to 1945 he took classes at the Basel School of Fine Arts, Switzerland, and in 1945 he made his first constructions, executed in wood, paper, and wire.  He also produced a series of “edible” pieces made out of grass.  In 1953 he moved to Paris, where he was a principal participant in the city’s postwar art scene.  In the late 1950s he joined the New Realism movement, which also included Yves Klein, Arman, and theorist Pierre Restany, exhibited at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris, France, in 1958.  In 1960 he captured the attention of the art world with his self-destructing mechanical piece, Homage to New York, which destroyed itself in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art.  In 1961 and 1962 he participated in “happenings” with Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Tinguely’s wife, French artist Niki de Saint-Phalle. Throughout his life he continued to execute large-scale commissions, including the fountain outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris (in collaboration with his wife) and a gargantuan sculpture in the Fontainebleau Forest in Paris.  A 1990 show in Moscow, Russia featured a 17-foot high piece called Altar of Western Affluence and Totalitarian Commercialism.

www.tinguely.ch/de.html

Wayne Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920 and raised in Long Beach, California.  Early in life he pursued a career as a cartoonist, an illustrator and a muralist and held a position at the Walt Disney Pictures Studio for a year until he decided to become a painter in 1949.  He enrolled at California State College, receiving a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1953.  In 1951 he had his first exhibition of paintings at the Crocker Art Gallery, Sacramento, California.  Thiebaud’s big break came in 1956 to 1957, when he lived in New York and met the de Koonings, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Philip Pearlstein.  Allan Stone gave him the first New York show in 1962, and Thiebaud went on to gain notoriety in the 1960s for his painting of pies and other all-American foodstuffs.  Beginning with an exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, California, in 1968, his work has been part of touring shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California.  Although often associated with Pop art and the work of the Bay Area artists Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, Thiebaud’s distinctive still lifes, as well as his figure compositions and landscapes, are more akin to Impressionism filtered through the paintings of Edward Hopper.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by International Arts & Artists

Linda Thern-Smith was born in Omar, West Virginia, in 1946.  She received a B.F.A. in painting at Florida International University, Miami, in 1975, and an M.F.A. in ceramics at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 1977.  Her work has been exhibited in the mid-Atlantic region, as well as in Kenya and Lithuania, and can be found in several collections, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., the Hunter Museum of Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio.   Thern-Smith has also served as a curator and an independent critic for many art publications.  Since 1978, her art has explored the concepts of the fetish and the totem, objects that embody supernatural power, and she has skillfully exploited the natural beauty of her materials.  She initially wrapped copper wire around bundles of nails, twigs, and clay tubes; later she incorporated tool handles and slate into her sculptures, sometimes inscribing them with drawings and ideograms.  Her more recent work features carved stone.

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

George Tames was born on January 21, 1919 in Washington D.C. Tames began working in photography when he gained access to Congressmen through his job as an office-boy  in the Washington Bureau of Time-Life. In 1940, his assignments took him to Capitol Hill where he photographed members of Congress, meetings of the Truman Committee and other aspects of life on the Hill. His work has been featured in multiple publications, specifically the New York Times, who he worked for from 1945-1985. Tames died on February 23, 1994.