File Under: m

Michael Mazur was born in New York City in 1935. He attended the Horace Mann School, New York and received a B.A from Amherst College, Massachusetts before completing a B.F.A. in 1959 and an M.F.A. in 1961 at the School of Art Yale University. He exhibited widely throughout the United States and Korea and his work is included in collections at the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Smithsonian, Washington, DC. His graceful work encompassed folding screens, monotypes, pastel drawings, and other works on paper. His painterly technique perfectly complemented his images, which were often of plants and trees, or of tools. Mazur died on August 18, 2009.

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

Harlan Mathieu was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1953.  In 1976 he received his B.A. in art from Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa.  He was awarded his M.A. in 1979 and an M.F.A. in 1981 from the University of Iowa, Iowa City.  He is also a designer for theatrical productions and has been a visiting instructor at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan.  Harlan’s sensitive studies of tools, carefully laid out on a work table, draw on the formal qualities of Japanese woodcuts.  The images become a powerful testimony of the artist’s trade and, with their reference to a calendar form, a kind of personal diary.

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

Jiro Masuda was born in 1969 in Ontario, Canada, but grew up in Detroit, Michigan.  As a child, his parents played a prominent role in his budding passion for carpentry and metalwork.  Masuda earned his B.F.A. in Jewelry and Metalsmithing from the University of Houston, Texas, in 1993, and pursued his graduate studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he received an M.F.A. in Metalsmithing in 1996.  Masuda works with an amalgam of media including copper, brass, bronze, aluminum, silver, gold, platinum, steel, stainless steel, titanium, nickel, plastics and wood, and uses jewelry, silverware, and found objects to create some of his most impressive pieces.   Masuda has participated as an active member of the community at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.  He received an award in October 2008 at the 90^th Annual Toledo Area Artists Exhibition in Toledo, Ohio.  Masuda currently teaches Jewelry and Metalsmithing at the Detroit County Day School, Beverly Hills, Michigan.

www.jirojmasuda.com/

Jim Margroum (1921-2001) lived in Hanover, Pennsylvania, and was famous for his whimsical and unique hand-carved briarwood pipes. He marketed his pipes as “Mr. Groum’s Briarwood Pipes of Distinction,” engraving each pipe with the nom de plume “Mr. Groum.” What began as a creative hobby soon expanded into a successful business, resulting in Margroum carving at least 200 pipes a year and over 7000 throughout his career. He fashioned his pipes into a variety of unusual shapes—such as his signature apple-shaped pipe with a bite taken out of it, revealing half a worm—as well as everyday objects such as a soccer ball, shoes, pistols, and even a toilet (specially commissioned by a plumber). Mr. Groum’s pipes were featured in magazines, including Pipes and Tobacco Magazine and Wood Carving Illustrated, and also received several awards and recognition from Pipe Collectors International. While his pipes are works of art and are often preserved in collections, Margroum always designed his pipes to be smoked.

Joseph Maresca was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1946, and currently resides in Rhinecliff, Rhinebeck, NY. He received his BFA in industrial design from Pratt Institute, and a master’s degree in arts education from New York University. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Katonah Museum of Art, and even the White House—in honor of his design for an official White House tree ornament depicting Vanderbilt Mansion. Academically, Maresca has taught as an adjunct professor at New York University and at City University of New York, and has authored a book—WPA Buildings: Architecture and Art of the New Deal (2017)—about the influence of Works Project Administration architecture. The book examines the social impact on American cities of the imposing government buildings that were funded by the WPA to restore public confidence during the Great Depression.

MANUAL is the pseudonym for husband-and-wife photographers Edward Hill and Suzanne Bloom.  The name MANUAL, as explained by the artists, is derived from “art as (manual) labor, and art as instructional medium (a manual providing insight and information).”  Edward Hill was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1935.  He received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, in 1957 and an M.F.A. from Yale University, Connecticut, in 1960.  Suzanne Bloom was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1943.  She earned her B.F.A. from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, in 1965 and her M.F.A. from Yale University in 1968.  MANUAL’s work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States.  Both Hill and Bloom had been awarded individual fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a joint award from the NEA/Rockefeller Interdisciplinary Fellowship.  The two have worked together since the mid-1970s, creating manipulated photographs and videos.  In the 1980s they produced a series of photographs that explored pop-culture icons.

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

www.manualart.net/

John Mansfield was born in 1943 in Milton-Freewater, Oregon.  He spent his formative years in Japan and various parts of the United States, including Hawaii.  He earned his B.F.A. in 1966 from the College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, California, and his M.F.A. in 1970 from the University of Oregon.  In 1973, after a long hiatus, Mansfield returned to making art while living in Colorado.  He has since exhibited on the West Coast and in the Southwest.  Mansfield’s sculptures focus on the relationship between Eastern and Western cultures, exploring the differences in the way each culture visually represents the world.  Mansfield reinforced the differences by contrasting traditional Eastern and Western materials within his artworks.

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

www.johnmansfield.net/index.htm

Daniel Mack was born in 1947 in Rochester, New York. He earned a B.A. in anthropology in 1970 and an M.A. in media studies in 1975. He has been awarded a Mid-Atlantic Foundation Fellowship and two grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Mack's work is included in the collections of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, the American Craft Museum, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The artist has published a book, Making Rustic Furniture, which surveys the work of contemporary furniture makers and explains the techniques of rustic furniture fabrication. Mack's chairs are made from tree limbs stripped of their bark. He began incorporating other objects into his chairs in 1989 when he created a series of chairs that included antique tools and tools used in making furniture. In 1992 Mack stared a series of nautical chairs that incorporate objects relating to boating, sailing, and fishing. The artist feels that reusing discarded objects and unused bits of wood renews and prolongs their life and function.

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

Michael Malpass was born in New York City in 1946.  He received his B.F.A. in 1969, his M.F.A. in 1973, and a B.S. in welding in 1979, all from the Pratt Institute, New York.  He continued there as a professor of sculpture and welding until moving to Rutgers University in New Jersey.  He had his first one-man exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1977.  His work has been exhibited at several New York galleries, as well as at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, and the Brooklyn Museum.  Malpass’ work can be found in the collections of the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina, the Vassar College Art Museum, Poughkeepsie, New York, the National Museum of Art, Warsaw, Poland, and the National Art Museum, Sofia, Bulgaria.  His work is also included in major corporate collections, including those of TRW, the Ford Foundation, and General Electric Corporation.  He completed major commissions for the State of Connecticut and the New Jersey State Council of the Arts.  Malpass created his sculptures from found objects and often used discarded tools, hardware, and building materials.  He shaped these objects on a bandsaw, reducing the volumetric forms to linear elements that he then interlocked into complex geometric patterns, forming spheres.  During the course of his career, Malpass’ work became increasingly complex and the patterns and grids that comprised his spheres became more intricate.  Among his early influences were the found-object sculptures of Richard Stankiewicz and the work of Theodore Roszak, who, like Malpass, worked with molten steel. Michael Malpass died on February 15, 1991.

www.michaelmalpass.com

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. Updated to include mention of the artist’s passing