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Malcolm Owen was born in Buffalo, New York in 1948. He received his B.A. in philosophy from SUNY Binghamton, but almost did not graduate because he had not taken an Intro to Art course. He worked as a construction worker after graduating, but worked his way up the ranks to a carpenter. Owen was influenced by David Smith’s combination of welding and sculpture, and decided to learn how to weld. As he learned blacksmithing, he began making decorative iron works such as toilet paper holders and shelf brackets. Owen met Mary Ann Spavins at SUNY Oswego while pursuing his M.A, they got married and began Winged Camel Metalworks.

www.wingedcamel.com/

Tom Otterness was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1952. He joined the Art Students League in New York in 1970 and then did an independent study program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973. Otterness’ art is extremely accessible to the greater population because he has a way of making metal into friendly figures. He tells mini-fables through his art, and uses his metal figures to focus on the delight in the stories. However, many of his sculptures also tell stories of sex, money, class and race with his capitalist realism style. His works can be seen in parks, plazas, subway stations, libraries, courthouses and museums throughout the world. They are included in collections such as The Hague, the Netherlands, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Dusan Otasevic was born in 1940 in Belgrade, Serbia (former Yugoslavia). He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1966. He has participated in numerous exhibitions since 1963, including the Venice Biennale in 1972. In his lyrical compositions, which juxtapose such mundane objects a pliers, saws, and electric bulbs with primal elements of landscapes, Otasevic is searching for a broadened consciousness and a new order.

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

The son of a diplomat, Claes Oldenburg was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1929.  A master of transformation, Oldenburg is considered the classic Pop artist, garnering attention for both his soft sculptures and his large-scale public projects based on everyday objects.  Oldenburg received his B.A. from Yale University, Connecticut, in 1950.  He then worked in Chicago as a newspaper reporter while studying at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1952 to 1954.  The first of his signature oversized soft sculptures appeared in 1963 and over 30 have been realized as large-scale public monuments.  The giant Lipstick, for example, was installed at Yale University.  Since 1970 his work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, Germany, and the Tate Gallery in London, United Kingdom.  In recent years Oldenburg has returned to soft fabric sculpture and continues his long-standing relationship with Gemini G.E.L. in printmaking and cast sculpture.  In 1994 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center.

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

Georgia O’Keeffe (1987-1986) was born on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and began receiving art lessons at an early age. She was educated at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906, and at the Art Students League in New York from 1907 to 1908. She learned the techniques of traditional realist paintings, but soon shifted direction in 1912 to abstraction, due in part to studying under Arthur Wesley Dow. O’Keeffe began her career as an art teacher, but after moving to New York City in 1918, where she met and eventually married Alfred Stieglitz, she was able to devote herself solely to her art. Stieglitz, an influential photographer and collector at the time, encouraged and promoted O’Keeffe’s art, and was the first to exhibit her work. In the summer of 1929, O’Keeffe made the first of many trips to New Mexico, which later became her permanent home. O’Keeffe’s iconic paintings of abstract flowers and of the landscapes of the Southwest are collected in many of the world’s leading art museums. Her work has been celebrated in retrospectives at the Art Institute of Chicago (1943) and at the Museum of Modern Art (1946), which was the Museum’s first retrospective of a female artist’s work. O’Keeffe died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the age of 98.