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Judith McKellar is a longtime resident of Fairfax, in northern Virginia, where she is an active member of the arts community. She is primarily a sculptor and a printmaker and uses photography as her sketchbook. For a number of years she has been creating prints that explore the abstract patterns resulting from detailed observations of such mundane objects as stacks of lumber or shadows cast by rolls of wire.

Nancy McIntyre was born in Torrington, Connecticut, in 1950, and received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1972. She relocated to the Washington, DC, area in 1975 and currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia, where she has taught silkscreen printing at the Art League since 1997. McIntyre works mostly with silkscreen prints, and typically applies between 13 and 133 layers of ink for each work. Her prints elevate common scenes, as McIntyre explains: “Windows and porches — public edges of private lives — are the subjects I have returned to most often. I want my art to say: treasure those battered old porches and those cluttered, human-scale storefronts while they’re still around. As you pass by, notice them.” McIntyre’s prints have been exhibited at the National Building Museum, the Corcoran Gallery Museum, the Phillips Collection, and the Library of Congress. They are in numerous permanent and private collections, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Philadelphia Free Library.

John McIntosh was born in Port Huron, Michigan, in 1950.  He completed his B.A. at Whittier College, California, in 1973, and received his M.F.A. at the Yale University School of Art in 1977.  He has exhibited in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Houston, and Rochester.  His work can be found in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and at the Museum Ludwig, Germany.  McIntosh’s elegant, highly saturated color photographs tread the line between art and commercial advertising.  With references to art history and a nod to Walker Evans, his clever compositions using ordinary objects and tools are psychologically loaded commentaries on taste and other aspects of contemporary life.

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

Ed McGowin was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in 1938. He completed a B.S. at the University of Southern Mississippi in 1961 and an M.A. at the University of Alabama in 1964. He received National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1967 and 1980 and has exhibited widely, including at the Center for the Fine Arts in Miami, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and the Fort Worth Art Museum. His art can be found in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Kunstmuseet Collection in Lund, Sweden. He has been a professor at several universities and art schools since 1963. McGowin's series of paintings with hand-carved frames depicts a dense, menacing world given over to the human primordial instinct to dominate. A dark, absurd humor adds tension to these twisted narratives, which recall earlier historical treatments of battles or crowd scenes. His figures, typically engaged in such mundane activities as checking the time or tying ties, cross cultural and economic lines.

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

Mark McDowell was born in Pennsylvania in 1954. He earned a B.F.A. in drawing and printmaking from Pennsylvania State University and did graduate work at Arizona State University. McDowell has shown his paintings and prints throughout the United States, particularly in the Southwest, including the Tucson Art Institute and the Scottsdale Center for the Arts. In 1983 he received a fellowship in printmaking from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. His work can be found in the collections of Chase Manhattan Bank and the University of New Mexico. In the mid-1980s McDowell began a series of paintings on the Industrial Revolution in America as a kind of homage to tools that "make our lives on this planet a bit easier."

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

Born in 1971, Bradford McDougall is a Baltimore furniture designer and blacksmith who has been selling the one-of-a-kind mailboxes since 1991, when his first effort won an award at a craft fair in New York.  Constantly inspired by new designs, the majority of his mailboxes are made of virtually indestructible metal.  While some of McDougall’s customers use their metal mailboxes solely as decorative sculptural elements, others use them as their everyday mailboxes.  McDougall’s work is available locally at craft fairs and has been sold at Neiman Marcus in Washington, D.C.  His whimsical, handcrafted mailboxes have gained exposure at places such as the American Visionary Art Museum gift shop, Baltimore, Maryland, and the prestigious American Craft Council Craft Fair in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

 www.bradfordmcdougall.com/about.html

Mike McDonnell was born in Muskegon, Michigan, in 1937 and died in 2010. From 1956 to 1958 he studied with W.H. Moshy at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. He continued his classes from 1958 to 1960 with Sidney E. Dickinson at the Art Students League of New York. In 1959 he also completed a year of study at the National Academy School of Fine Arts in New York with Robert Phillip and Dean Cornwell. He received additional training in portraiture, initially in oil. McDonnell concentrated on painting still lifes and interiors, primarily in watercolor. In his work, he strived to idealize his everyday subjects while emphasizing clean, precise colors and details.

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

Jim McCullough was born in Chicago in 1924. He holds a B.S.M.E. from the University of New Mexico and an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California.  As a retired colonel who spent thirty years as an Air Force pilot, engineer and logistician, he began making dioramas in 1974, each of which represent a variety of themes such as historical, wildlife and nautical scenes.  Titled “American Heritage Dioramas in Perspective,” the ongoing series painstakingly re-creates the interiors of such architectural icons as the one-room schoolhouse, the post office, and various stores and churches, each complete with hand-carved furnishings.  McCullough has created approximately 120 unique dioramas that meticulously render interiors of the veritable world, in which the viewer’s eye may become lost.

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

www.ellasharp.org/ex-aw-jim-mccullough.html