rand hardy
lisa hoke
buzz spector

Rand Hardy creates object sculptures that fuse form and color. He works primarily with Aqua Resin, a gypsum-based and non-toxic material, continuing the tradition of plaster sculpture that dates to ancient times and remains vibrant today. His process involves four steps: generating forms, making molds, casting the molds with color included, and combining the forms into a cohesive whole. Hardy’s approach is intuitive and somewhat irrational, emphasizing empirical perception and resonating in multiple directions.

Lisa Hoke's work operates in the slippage between discrete objects and installations, utilizing materials extracted from recycled packaging and disposable ephemera. Since 2004, she has focused on large-scale mural installations and wall reliefs emphasizing the intensely synthetic color and texture of various disposable materials. She collects, reshapes, and arranges these materials, augmenting them with acrylic felt scraps, all organized around highly keyed and saturated colors. Layers upon layers are constructed to create a patterned density, contributing to a visual field of cacophony.

The book is always more than a carrier of words and pictures. Since the late 1980s, Buzz Spector has made collages, artists' books, and installations incorporating elements from dustjackets of hardcover books. He has also written about the author's photo as a portraiture category, noting the iconographic tropes used by authors and their photographers to represent powers of thought. Spector's installation, "About the Author," includes selected collages from dustjacket elements, a trio of wall-mounted photo sculptures, and a wall-mounted arrangement of clipped author photos titled Frieze. Spector's work with the book as subject and object is an essential influence in contemporary dialogues about the relationship between viewing and reading and the fate of the print book in an increasingly digital age.

About the Artists

Rand Hardy grew up in West Virginia and later earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute before relocating to New York in 1967. He has had eleven solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows. In July 2024, his work will be on display in a public space in Lower Manhattan, where he resides and works. For seventeen years, he taught in the sculpture department at New York University and currently leads weekend workshops at the Art Students League.

Lisa Hoke received her BA from The University of NC at Greensboro and a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, VA. She has been awarded a Purchase Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY; a Joan Mitchell Grant; The Edwin Austin Abbey Fellowship, NY; and an SECCA Award in the Visual Arts, NC. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Hoke's work is in many public collections, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, NY; and The New Orleans Museum of Art, LA.

Buzz Spector is an artist and writer whose artwork has been the focus of solo exhibitions in such museums and galleries as the Saint Louis Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA, Orange County Museum of Art, and Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV. The artist's most recent museum exhibit, at the Rockford (IL) Art Museum, was "Buzz Spector: Reading Matter," 2022, a survey of his work with books. Spector's art makes frequent use of the book as subject and object and is concerned with relationships between public history, individual memory, and perception.