File Under: b

Stan Bowman currently resides in Ithaca, New York where he maintains a studio and operates a business where he produces high-quality Giclee prints for other artists. Bowman is a mixed-media artist, working in photography, various painting media, as well as digital montage, and 3D. He has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally and has been the recipient of numerous grants, residencies, and other awards. His work, both text and images, have been published in such periodicals as the Village Voice, Innovative Printmaking, and Zoom magazine. He received a B.A. in Sociology, a B.Arch. from the University of California-Berkeley, and an M.F.A. in photography from the University of New Mexico-Albuquerque. Bowman retired from Cornell in 1999. He was born in California in 1934.

Source: http://aap.cornell.edu/people/stanley-bowman?department=7

www.stanbowman.com/

Jonathan Borofsky was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1942.  He received a B.F.A. from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  After studying at the École de Fontainebleau in France in 1964, Borofsky earned his M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut in 1966.  He works in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, and also creates site-specific installations.  In 1975 Borofsky had his first solo exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, and has since exhibited throughout the world, including solo exhibitions at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Japan, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.  Borofsky’s work has also been included in three Whitney Biennials and in Documenta VII, Kassel, Germany.  His work is included in many international museum collections.

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

www.borofsky.com/

Mark Blumenstein was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1943.  After studying agriculture at Pennsylvania State University for a year, he left to work for a photography company.  In his spare time he began to make carved wood sculptures.  In the early 1970s he moved to a farm in West Virginia.  He bought a set of welding torches so that he could dismantle the discarded trucks and machinery he found on the property, and he began to weld the objects together; first into furniture for his log cabin, then into sculptures.  The whimsical sculptures of birds and animals he creates from farm machinery, old tools and found objects are in art collections around the country.  Blumenstein found in the old tools and machinery a history he felt should be acknowledged:  he said, “I just couldn’t see discarding pieces of the past that so many hands had been involved with.”

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

www.markblumenstein.com

Herbert Lawrence Block, the political cartoonist better known as "Herblock,", was born on October 13, 1909 in Chicago, Illinois. Block began taking classes at the Art Institute of Chicago at the age of eleven. After graduating from high school, he attended Lake Forest College, but never received a degree. After beginning to work for the Newspaper Enterprise Association, Block won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1942 for his political cartoons. Block joined the Army in the same year, and was hired by The Washington Post upon his discharge. Block became the most honored cartoonist of his time, winning three Pulitzer Prizes, was the only living cartoonist whose work was exhibited in the National Gallery of Art, and the only living cartoonist to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He caricatured thirteen U.S. presidents, from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush, chronicling American history from the 1929 Stock Market crash through summer 2001. He took on causes with courage and conviction, coined the phrase "McCarthyism," forced reform and became the most influential and enduring political cartoonist in American history. Herbert Block’s work was inspired by such artists as Jay Darling and Edmund Duffy. Block died on October 7, 2001.

www.herbblockfoundation.org/

David Bigelow was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1949, and received his B.F.A. in printmaking and drawing from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1971. After teaching at several prestigious colleges and universities in the United States, Bigelow resigned from the realm of academia in 1980 to become a full-time printmaker and started Bigelow Studios.  His etchings and drawings have been exhibited across the country, and as an artist, Bigelow strives to search for the profound in the mundane and the ambiguous in the apparent.  The artist and his wife, Marcia – who often helps him fill in his etchings with watercolor – currently reside in Springfield, Missouri. He teaches art at Evangel University as he continues to exhibit and juries art fairs.

Constance Bergfors was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, and was educated at Smith College, where she majored in zoology.  While working as a medical illustrator she developed a love for drawing, which she pursued first at the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C., and then at the Accademia di Belle Arte in Rome.  The artist traveled and lived abroad in both Europe and Africa before returning to the United States in 1964.  Her work has been shown in exhibitions at the Gallerie d’Italia, Rome, the Museo Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, and various East Coast galleries and museums in the United States.  Bergfors’ initial flat canvases of floating color shapes gradually evolved into irregularly shaped relief paintings.  Well after having become established as a painte, she took up carving, first in stone and then in wood.  Despite the change in media, she continues to focus on abstract biomorphic forms as the subject of her work.  Bergfors’ sculptural process consists of stripping logs of their outer bark and sapwood, carving the wood with a chainsaw, and then sanding and polishing it to achieve a smooth finish.

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

Barton Lidicé Beneš was born in New Jersey in 1942 and died in New York in 2012.  He studied painting at the Pratt Institute, New York, in 1960 and graphics at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Avignon, France, in 1968. His work is included in the collections of the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France.  Beneš uses all sorts of found objects, as well as objects collected in his travels around the world, to create his collages, sculptures, and assemblages.  His works are humorous explorations of societal customs and assumptions.  In 1983 Beneš made a series of collages and paper sculptures from six million dollars in shredded bills he was given by the Federal Reserve Board.  In the wake of the AIDS epidemic, Beneš tackled the issue by using controversial materials such as AIDS victims’ cremated remains and HIV-positive blood. With a lighter perspective, his pieces often include visual puns and are often crafted to look as if they were made from other media.  The artist extends his punning to the titles, whose meaning becomes central to the objects.

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

Patricia Bellan-Gillen received her B.F.A. from Edinboro State University, Edinboro, Pennsylvania, in 1975, and an M.F.A. in printmaking from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in 1979. She has been awarded two grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and one from Carnegie-Mellon. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. In her prints, Bellan-Gillen combines unrelated objects into still-life arrangements that encourage viewers to reexamine their perceptions. She is the Dorothy L. Stubnitz Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she teaches a variety of classes including Foundation Drawing, Concept Studio, Painting and MFA Seminar.

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

www.patriciabellangillen.com/

Ray Beldner is a sculptor and new media artist whose work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and can be found in many public and private collections including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and the Federal Reserve Board, Washington D.C., the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Oakland Museum of California, the San Jose Museum of Art, the diRosa Preserve in Napa, California, among others.

Born in 1961 in San Francisco, Beldner received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Mills College. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including a California Arts Council Fellowship in New Genres, a Creative Work Fund Grant from the Haas Foundations, and a Potrero Nuevo environmental art grant. He has taught sculpture, interdisciplinary studies, and Professional Practices at the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, San Francisco State University, and University of California, Santa Cruz.

His work has been reviewed in publications including Art in America, Arte, Art On Paper, Artweek, Wired, Playboy, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. A profile of him and his work can be found in the book: Epicenter, San Francisco Bay Area Art Now, by Chronicle Books.

Source: www.raybeldner.com/