File Under: W

Dina Wind was born in Haifa, Israel in 1938 and died in 2014. She received a B.A. from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a Certificate of Art Appreciation in 1972 from the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. She continued her studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where she completed an M.A. in 1974. She exhibited her sculptures throughout the mid-Atlantic region, including the Allentown Art Museum, the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, and the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh. Wind created her welded-steel sculptures, which she likened to three-dimensional still-life paintings, by using a TIG welding machine to combine discarded farm implements and other metal scraps into flowing, organic compositions tinged with humor.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. edited to reflect the artist’s passing

Bill Wilson was born in 1931 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and died in 2013.  He received a B.A. from the College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia.  He attended the Art Students’ League in New York and studied with George Grosz and Reginald Marsh, and then shortly after spent three years traveling in the South Pacific.  In 1959 he received an M.F.A. in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.  Wilson’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and is included in the collections of the Albany Museum, Albany, New York, the Schenectady Museum, Schenectady, New York, and the Munson-Williams Proctor Institute of Art, Utica, New York.  Wilson’s prints and mixed-media works present striking, illusionistic twists on Action Painting and challenge conventional perceptions of mundane objects.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. Edited to reflect the artist’s passing

William T. Wiley was born in Bedford, Indiana, in 1937.  He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, earning his B.F.A. in 1961and his M.F.A. a year later.  Since 1960 he has participated in numerous exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., among others.  His work can be found in collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.  Like Robert Arneson and other California funk artists of the 1960s, Wiley delights in the absurd and the incongruous, while his sense of fantasy recalls the pre-Surrealist dreamscapes of Giorgio de Chirico.  His densely layered paintings and prints depict imaginary worlds and cosmic struggles, complete with hermetic symbols and often humorous observations scrawled within the images and in the margins.  His equally inventive sculptures also address the enchantment of the mundane.  Over the years, Wiley’s influence has been pervasive, especially with the New Image generation of the 1970s and 1980s.

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

www.williamtwiley.com/

Robert Wideman was born in Albany, New York, in 1953 and studied at the State University of New York. Since 1976 he has designed and created objects in ferrous materials while teaching metalsmithing on his own and in association with such institutions as the Hancock Shaker Museum and the Old Chatham Shaker Museum. In addition to making his own sculptures, he works on commissions and develops armatures and components for other sculptors. In one series, he transformed recognizable tools and mechanisms into new dynamic objects that have great beauty and wit but still retain their original, functional design.

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

Susan Dorothea White was born in August 10, 1941 in Adelaide, Australia. White received a Diploma of Fine Art from the South Australian School of Art (SASA) and was taught a multidisciplinary fine art curriculum by artists such as Dora Chapman. After graduation, White discovered her love of lithography, which guided her through much of her career. Her work touches on issues of the human condition, and has become more politically charged as the artist has adopted satire as a way to delve into issues such as human rights and equality. White’s work has been exhibited around the world and is included in collections such as the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the Buhl Collection, New York, and the Van der Vossen-Delbrück Collection, Amsterdam.

Horace Clifford Westermann was born on December 11, 1922 in Los Angeles, California and died in Brookfield Center, Connecticut in 1981. Westermann joined the Marine Corps in 1942. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago multiple times, but never received a degree. Since childhood, H.C. Westermann had been intrigued by acrobatics, and he combined this with his love of sculpting to create quirky works that intrigued people all over. Many later artists, such as Bruce Nauman, Jim Nutt and William T. Wiley, claim to have been influenced by Westermann’s innovative techniques and insights.

Silas West, a folk artist from Haverhill, Massachusetts, was active around the turn of the century.  He is known for his realistic, pressed-metal figures of billposters painted in bright colors.  Some of these appear to be witty interpretations of advertising stunts.  In 1897 West obtained patents for many of his designs, some of which have been located on buildings and barn sides in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and upstate New York.

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

David Webster was born in Wadsworth, Ohio in 1947, and earned his B.F.A. from Miami University, and an M.F.A. from Yale University.  After living in France for twenty-two years, he returned to New York.  Equally adept in painting, sculpture, and works on paper, he is the recipient of several commissions and a Pollack-Krasner Grant.  He has participated in several exhibitions at the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, Pittsburgh Art Center, the Islip Art Museum, and P.S. 1 Museum, New York, among others.  His work is in collections throughout Europe and the United States.  In the eighties, his work reflected an interest in mythology, primitive religion, and architecture, exploring such themes as ecology, gender, and healthy through a distilled, often multipart, geometry of symbols.  Since the nineties, his imagery has concerned itself with the human body, with light making a frequent appearance in his work.  One series exploits the transformative illumination and pictorial qualities of the X-ray to present his own hands and feet as metaphor and language. His painting has also addressed histology, the microscopic study of cells, interpreting complex processes and pathways through lush paintings of biomorphic abstraction.

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

davidwebster.net/

Genna Watson was born in 1948 in Baltimore, Maryland. She received her B.F.A. from Maryland Institute, College of Art and her M.F.A. from University of Wisconsin, Madison. Watson’s sculptures have been characterized as a part of the American Art Povera movement, referring to the materials used by the artist which are thought of as poor. This includes tree branches, dirt, straw, discarded metals etc. Her art is very harsh and haunting to viewers, but has become more noteworthy as she has developed her technique in working with natural or industrial materials. Watson’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States in solo and group exhibitions, and is included in many private collections.