Background
Norman Gardner's artistic vision started at an early age. As a child, he whittled his earliest toy constructions out of wooden crates. While in first grade, he won his first creative competition with a drawing of a Model T Ford, receiving a bronze medal from the John Wanamaker Corporation. He subsequently supported himself through high school and college by carving plastic toy models for the injection molding industry.
Graduating as a Mechanical Engineer from City College in NYC, in 1949, Gardner worked variously as a guided missile designer, product development engineer and drafting instructor. If his background seems in some ways to parallel that of Alexander Calder, it is in their shared sense of playfulness combined with a solid grasp of engineering principles.
After serving two years in the army, Gardner abandoned engineering to pursue his first love: fine arts, receiving his Masters of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 1955. Even before graduating, he was appointed to the faculty at Pratt where he then taught for the next twelve years. He first began showing his sculptures in the early sixties at the Schoneman Gallery in Manhattan and has been represented by more than thirty galleries all over the U.S. in the years since, including many that produced one-man shows of his sculptures and other works.
