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Charlie Sleichter received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, and currently lives in Washington, DC. Sleichter works mostly with sculpture and architectural forms. From this passion, he began his own renovation company, Artwork Construction, in 1984. He is an active member of DC’s art community, and in 1981 renovated and built affordable art studios in an abandoned DC elementary school. His artwork has been included in the annual Washington Project of the Arts show and is exhibited in many galleries in the DC area.

Aaron Siskind was an American photographer who engaged with many of the ideas of Abstract Expressionism popular in 1940s New York City, inflecting photography with an eye towards the flatness of the picture plane. Born in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in 1903, his interest in poetry and music led him to believe he would become a writer. Siskind earned his Bachelor of Social Science degree in Literature from the College of the City of New York in 1926 and went on to teach English in the New York City public school system for 21 years. A camera given as a gift at his wedding by Sidonie Glaller in 1930 galvanized his interest in photography. With his newfound love for photography, Siskind became an enthusiastic member of the New York Photo League. Siskind became director of the Photo League's Feature Group in 1936, leading a unit of photographers who produced photo-essays of working-class, urban life, with titles such as The Most Crowded Block in the World. His photographs of Harlem exemplify the spirit of his first encounters with the camera, which he used to gain access to and frame the empirical world of Depression-era New York City like many of his contemporaries. Even in these referential, representational photographs, Siskind's eye for form remains salient. These early photographs form the backdrop to the later work that came to define his artistic vision: his drive to obscure his subject by focusing on form at the expense of content and context. His approach to making a picture with intimate framing, emphasis on texture, line, and visual rhymes, created images that obscure content and abstract the empirical world.

Hollis Sigler was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1948 and died in 2001. In 1970 she graduated from Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, where she studied figure drawing and worked in an Abstract Expressionist mode. While studying at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1971-73 she became exposed to the power of untrained, visionary artists and to the city's dominant movement, the Chicago Imagists, who were influenced by comic books, carnival imagery, and outsider art. At the same time, she was affected by feminism's validation of personal and emotional content in art. After earning her M.F.A. in 1973, she continued to work in a realist style until she turned to drawing, which inspired a new "faux-naive" style ideally suited to her inner aesthetic impulses. Since her first exhibition of drawings in 1977 at the Nancy Lurie Gallery in Chicago, her work has been exhibited widely, including exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum, the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne, Switzerland, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and can be found in collections worldwide. Her narratives are personal and collective metaphors for devastation and hope. Enhanced by hand-written titles, her haunting, otherworldly images of largely unpopulated domestic interiors and fanciful landscapes disarm the viewer with their high-keyed palette, expressionist gesture, and skewed perspectives.

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

Jay Shoots attended Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University in New York, and the New England School of Photography in Boston, Massachusetts. Jay uses his photographs as a way to study how things and people actually look. He uses simple classical compositions, with a large range of color and well-trained use of positive and negative shapes. Shoots wants to reveal the true essence of an object through his photographs, so he combines traditional methods with technological improvements within documentary, formalism and conceptualism. In this way, he finds the spirit of man through his work.

Roger Shimomura was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1939.  He received his B.A. in graphic design from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1961.  He continued his studies at various institutions before earning an M.F.A. in 1969 from Syracuse University, New York.  As a recipient of numerous fellowships and grants, he has exhibited his paintings and prints throughout the United States since 1965.  He has also had a distinguished teaching career and has written, directed, and produced a number of theatrical performances.  In his multilayered, action-packed paintings, which are rendered in flat, bright colors, politics are combined with ukiyo-e imagery, pop-culture clichés, and everyday consumer products.  The resulting juxtapositions reflect his own personal history as a third-generation Japanese-American and also address the broader social and cultural conflicts between the two countries.

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

Born in 1947, Madelaine Shellaby received a B.A. from Scripps College, Claremont, California, in 1966 and an M.A. in painting from the University of California at Berkeley in 1976. Shellaby's work has been exhibited at museums and art centers throughout the United States, including the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, the Hanson Gallery, New Orleans, and the University of California, Davis. She has been a guest lecturer and artist at the University of California at Berkeley and the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland. She begins her drawings with photographic images, which she then transfers to paper by means of a photo-emulsion process and works with graphite and pastel. Shellaby's work focuses on construction sites and architectural details of interior spaces.

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

Lee A. Schuette was born in Berlin, New Hampshire, in 1951.  In 1971 he apprenticed with Jack O’Leary at Tariki Stoneware in Meriden, New Hampshire.  The following year he attended the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington.  He received a B.F.A. from the University of Hampshire in Durham, and an M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.  For the next three years he taught at the Wendell Castle Workshop in Scottsville, New York.  A recipient of several awards, Schuette has been an instructor and an architectural designer in addition to a creator of highly innovative sculpture and furniture.  His work has been exhibited at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C.  Drawing directly from nature and everyday life, Schuette challenges conventional ideas of furniture and materiality in his whimsical, masterfully crafted works.

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

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Joseph R. Schubert was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1932 and died in Alexandria, Virginia in 2017. He was ordained in 1961 but left the priesthood in 1970. Schubert received his formal training in realist watercolor painting under Margaret Graham Kranking, and began painting in the watercolor medium in 1983. His works have been featured in American Artist and Modern Maturity magazines and accepted in national, regional, and local juried exhibitions. Schubert's still lifes explore the special qualities of light and color values found in the musky, cluttered rooms of curio shops and old barns, or the random formal settings of more gracious antique rooms. His landscapes capture the silent moods of New England coastal villages and the deserts and mountains of the West and the Southwest.

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

John Schlesinger was born in New York City in 1955. He has a B.S. in art education and a B.A. in philosophy and photography from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He has received several awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He has exhibited throughout the United States, the Netherlands, Scotland, Germany, and France. In the Surrealist tradition, Schlesinger draws on film and television, as well as staged and random elements from everyday life, to construct multilayered dream-like images that address issues of alienation from self and society. Surrounded with areas of darkness, his forms seem to float freely in space, lending an unsettling presence. In 1991 Schlesinger began a series of mostly figurative photographs mounted on circular saw blades that exploit the constructive and destructive qualities of the implement.

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