Charles Hinman

Charles Hinman (b. 1932) is an Abstract Minimalist artist who pioneered hard-edged three-dimensional shaped canvases. Starting in the mid-60s, Hinman projected the surface of his canvases forward using wood supports underneath to explore realms of light and color beyond the traditional rectangular picture plane. Born in Syracuse, New York, Hinman earned a BFA from Syracuse University in 1955 and studied at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts (now the Everson Museum of Art) and the Art Students League.

His road to his career as a painter was unconventional; Hinman played professional baseball for the Milwaukee Braves and served in the United States Army from 1956 to 1958. His major exhibitions in the mid-60s include shows at the Sidney Janis Gallery (Seven New Artists, 1964-65), the Richard Feigen Gallery (solo exhibition, 1965), Tibor de Nagy Gallery (Shape and Structure, 1965), and the Whitney Museum (Young America, 1965). Hinman has received many awards including at the Everson Museum, three at the Butler Institute of American Art, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work can be found in the collections of Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Denver Art Museum, the Nagaoka Museum in Japan, the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel, and others.