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Amy Musia was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1950. After graduating from North Texas State University, she moved to Evansville, Indiana, where she continued her art instruction in wood sculpture. Since the early 1980s she has maintained Lone Star Studio. Her sculptures and drawings have been exhibited throughout the United States and are included in collections such as North Texas University, Evansville Museum of Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Musia is best known for her imaginative and humorous wood-and-Plexiglas sculptures of water faucets. Another series features large-scale mixed-media versions of fishing flies.

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

Bruno Munari was born on October 24, 1907 in Milan, Italy. Originally inspired by Marinetti, Munari exhibited with the Futurists in his early career. He also worked as a graphic designer with Riccardo Castagnedi, and became associated with Louis Aragon and Andre Breton as a press graphic designer in 1933. He was editor for Mondadori and the art director of Tempo Magazine. He went on to co-found Movimento Arte Concreta, the Italian concrete art movement. In order to display his true thematic evolution as an artist, Munari put on his own solo exhibition in 1969. Bruno Munari died on September 30, 1998 at age 90.

Cindi Morrison was awarded an individual Fellowship by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.  In 1995, she was an Artist in Residence at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.  She received both her B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Edinboro University, Edinboro, Pennsylvania, and shortly after, exhibited widely in the state.  Her work can be found in numerous private collections as well as the Erie Art Museum, Pennsylvania.  Morrison is currently the Director of The Appleton Museum of Art in Ocala, Florida.

Jerry Monteith was born in 1951 in Sylva, North Carolina. He received a B.F.A. in sculpture from University of North Carolina and an M.F.A. in sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Monteith collects the wood he uses in his work locally, and wants to create works that are interesting to look at. Jerry Monteith utilizes naturally occurring intricacies of the wood as the base of most of his works, but manipulates them to mirror other organic life forms. He is currently the head of graduate studies at the School of Art and Design at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he has worked for nearly three decades.

Mineo Mizuno was born in Gifu Prefecture, Japan, in 1944. From 1966 to 1968 he studied ceramics at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he was exposed to the almost machine-perfect, "fetish finish" style of the West Coast potters under Ralph Bacerra. He worked as a ceramics designer for Interpace China Corporation in Glendale, California, for ten years, establishing his own studio in 1978. In 1981 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Award. His work has been shown throughout the United States and Japan and is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and the Hokkaido Museum of Art, Sapporo, Japan. Profoundly influenced by Josef Albers, Mizuno explores color and texture through various glazes and gestural brushstrokes in his exquisitely crafted pieces, which he sometimes combines into series for added compositional effect.

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

Hernan Miranda was born in Concepcion, Paraguay in 1960. He never attended a formal institution to study art, but he taught himself techniques such as Claroscuro, also known as Chiaroscuro, by studying the masters of the affect. His main influences were artists such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Vermeer, and Antonio Lopez, who inspired him to reach beyond technical painting. Miranda began working towards illusionist painting by using simple images in his works. He wanted to achieve “Visual Affection” by communicating with the viewer in an easily digestible manner. Hernan Miranda also appreciated the importance of light, and considered it the protagonist of his paintings. Miranda’s work has been exhibited extensively in Paraguay, but has also traveled to countries around the world, including France, South Korea, and Japan. Currently Miranda lives and works in the United States.

www.hernanmiranda.com/welcome.html

Joseph Martin Mills was born in 1951 in Beloit, Wisconsin. He received a B.A. in communications from American University, and also attended Maryland Institute College of Art, The Corcoran School of Art and Rochester Institute of Technology. Mills spent time in a mental institution at the age of twenty-one, which greatly influenced his art in later years. He wanted his art to show individuals as opposed to social settings or groups. Joseph states that his art is a personal process of self-discovery. He has been featured in many solo and group exhibitions, including his first solo museum exhibition “Inner City”, in which the artist displays the poverty and decay of Washington D.C during the late 1980s. Mills works are included in the collections of Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, and other institutions.

David H. Merrifield was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1968. He received a B.S in Engineering Arts from Michigan State University. He owns a studio in Asheville, North Carolina. Merrifield is inspired by the industrial and natural worlds, and looks to create works that consider each surface as a part of the whole. He also pays great attention to the materials he chooses to use when creating his work, as he believes these materials not only contribute to the structural stability of the piece, but also to the aesthetic quality. Merrifield has works in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and has participated in multiple group exhibitions throughout the United States.

John McQueen was born in Oakland, Illinois, in 1943. He studied at Florida State University, Tallahassee, in 1961-63 and the University of Indiana in Bloomington in 1964-65 before completing a B.A. at the University of South Florida in Tampa in 1971 and an M.F.A. at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1975. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowships and a United States/Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship. He has participated in several exhibitions, including shows at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Kansas City Art Institute, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, and the Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum in Trondheim, Norway. Although McQueen originally created conventional works using sod and adobe clay, in 1975 he started making meditational baskets. This momentous shift made him a leading figure of the movement that questioned the traditional distinction between craft and art. At the same time, he revolutionized the conventional definition of a basket. Issues of containment, isolation, security, and control are central to his work. He deftly weaves his baskets out of bark, twigs, vines, and burrs, using self-taught or invented patterns. Their highly original forms often explore the connections between nature and man. In 1979 he began incorporating words into his baskets, establishing a fertile dialogue between a basket as a container of space and language as a carrier of thought.

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