Hunt Slonem

Born 1951, Kittery, Maine; lives in Manhattan, N.Y.

Hunt Slonem is a critically acclaimed, innovative painter based in Manhattan, New York. He spent much of his childhood moving around the U.S. as a result of his father’s military postings.

After completing school, Slonem commenced undergraduate studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, but later graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, with a focus on Painting and Art History. Slonem also took courses at the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, where he was exposed to such eminent artists from the New York area as Louise Nevelson, Alex Katz, Alice Neel, Richard Estes, Jack Levine, and Al Held.

Hunt Slonem is best known for his expressionist paintings of tropical birds, based on a personal aviary in which he keeps about 100 live birds of various species. His fascination with exotica can be traced to his experiences as a child in Hawaii and as a foreign exchange student in Nicaragua. In the 1980s, after three trips to India, Slonem’s work became more formal and complex in composition. He began building patterns of repeat images of birds, butterflies, and other inhabitants of his peculiar world.

Hunt Slonem has received several grants and fellowships in recognition of his career. His work has been collected by over seventy museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, Spain and the Wurth Museum, Kunzelsau, Germany – to name a few.