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James Rosenquist was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1933 and died in 2017 in New York City.  He moved frequently throughout the Midwest with his parents, who shared with him their interest in airplanes and mechanics.  He began taking art classes in junior high school.  He earned his B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1948 and studied painting under Cameron Booth.  In the summer, he painted signs and bulk storage tanks in Iowa, Wisconsin, and North Dakota.  In 1954 Rosenquist painted his first billboard, and a year later, on scholarship to the Art Students’ League in New York; he studied with Edwin Dickinson, Will Barnet, Morris Kantor, George Grosz, and Vaclav Vytacil and shared a studio with Robert Indiana, Robert Rauschenberg, and others.  In 1957 he joined the sign painters’ union, and in 1958 he went to work painting billboards for ArtKraft Strauss Company and creating window displays for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany & Company.  Two years later he had saved up enough money to paint full-time in his studio in Coenties Slip near the East River in Manhattan.  He progressed from Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art to exploring the application of commercial materials and techniques in his painting.  The resulting montagelike compositions of deliberately fragmented images from popular culture quickly became his signature.  He sold out his first solo exhibition at the Green Gallery in New York in 1962.  The first of his truly colossal paintings, F-111, a visual digest of mid-1960s conflict, cemented his reputation.  Major exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museo d’Arte Moderna in Turin, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, the Denver Art Museum, and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.  Beginning in the early 1960s Rosenquist was also actively involved with printmaking workshops, and numerous exhibitions have been devoted to his graphic production.  The visceral imagery of his mature style, with its jarring juxtapositions of cropped close-ups of figures and representations of consumer and industrial products, speaks to the changing fabric of American society.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. Edited to reflect the artist’s passing

www.jimrosenquist-artist.com/

Gail Rosenbloom Kaplan is a working artist with a studio in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Her portfolio of work includes trompe l‘oeil clay, glass mosaics, printmaking and mixed media. As an artist she has been privileged to not only create art but also to share her talents with the community through gallery exhibitions and community installations. She has gained recognition both in her home state of Michigan and internationally. Her work has been displayed through the Arts and Embassy Program and showcased in Norway, Barbados and Brazil. She was chosen by the Gifts of Art for exhibition at the Taubman Gallery at the University of Michigan Hospital. Gail believes in the power of art to heal and teach and is committed to community projects with schools, hospitals and senior citizen residences. Art is an integral part of her life as it helps to define who she is as an individual and as a member of the community at large.

www.gailrosenbloomkaplan.com/about.html

Rod Rosebrook was born in Masonville, Colorado, in 1900 and worked as a cattleman and farmer for most of his life. He started collecting old tools and antique wrought iron in the 1950s for his Old Time Museum of ranching and pioneer life. A self-taught artist, Rosebrook learned blacksmithing on cattle drives and began welding pieces from his collection to make fences and gates in the late 1970s. His work was first shown by the Ricco-Maresca Gallery in the 1980s. It is included in the Hemphill Folk Art Collection and has been exhibited at the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. Rosebrook died in 1994 in Redmond, Oregon.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. Edited to reflect the artist’s passing

Mel Rosas was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1950.  He earned a B.F.A. from Drake University, Des Moines in 1972 and an M.F.A. in painting from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, in 1975.  Rosas creates prints as well as works on paper in charcoal and acrylic.  His work has been exhibited in galleries and art centers throughout the United States, and he has been awarded two Creative Artist Grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts.  In the late 1970s Rosas produced a series of drawings of construction sites, furnace rooms and pipes featuring tightly cropped compositions and lush surfaces.

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

Connie Roberts is known for carving wooden whistles; she is called the “Whistle Lady”. Although she was trained as a figure painter, receiving her M.F.A in painting from the University of Iowa in the 1970s, Roberts chose to start wood carving because she wanted to bridge fine arts with folk arts. Constance uses a sense of humor to approach difficult issues within her work. The three main themes within her work include popular culture, nursery rhymes and political commentary.

Guenther Riess was born in Wels, Austria on February 20, 1945 and died on January 4, 2015 in Erie, Colorado.  He attended the Chouinard Art Institute, in Los Angeles, CA after moving with his family to the United States. Riess was inspired by buildings under construction for the majority of his artistic career. He made three-dimensional models of construction sites with mixed media; including paint, wood and paper. He did not intend for his works to be representational, but instead hoped to bring out connotations of construction in the viewer. He worked from photographs of sites rather than visiting himself. Riess also did not create his models to scale, but instead focused on the importance of each aspect of the building.

Nancy Reinke (1931-2009) was born in Chattanooga, TN, and established herself as a professional artist in Alexandria, Virginia, where she kept a studio for 35 years at the Torpedo Factory Art Center. Reinke, whose father was the publisher of the Chattanooga New-Free Press, learned typesetting as a child, and was often covered in newspaper ink from playing around the presses. Reinke attended the Girls Preparatory School in Chattanooga, and went on to study at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Professionally, she specialized in graphic design and commercial art and illustration; as an artist, she drew from this background in her innovative etchings, woodcuts, wood engravings, and oil paintings, as well as her unique handmade books. Reinke’s passion for animal rights and love of cats (she owned over 50 cats throughout her life) can be seen in her vivid use of animal imagery in her often humorous artwork. Her work has been exhibited not only in galleries but also in prominent public institutions such as the Library of Congress and the State of Virginia Legislative Building.

Michael Ramus was born in Naples, Italy, in 1917 and died in 2005.  He studied lithography at the Art Students’ League, New York, and at Yale University.  Throughout his career as an illustrator, he also made drawings, paintings, and sculptures.  Ramus’ illustrations have been published in American Heritage, Audubon, Sports Illustrated, and Smithsonian.  Many of his sculptures such as the large-scale tool series of the late 1980s were constructed of cardboard and then painted to stimulate the textures and surfaces of actual objects.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. Edited to reflect the artist’s passing