Hunt Slonem American

Hunt Slonem is renowned for his distinct neo-expressionist style. He is best known for his series of bunnies, butterflies and tropical birds, as well as his large-scale sculptures and restorations of forgotten historic homes. Slonem’s works can be found in the permanent collections of 250 museums around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Whitney, the Miró Foundation and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Since his first solo show at the Fischbach Gallery in 1977, Slonem’s work has been showcased hundreds of times, most recently at The Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden (2026), Louisiana State Museum (2024), Albany Institute of History & Art (2024), Vienna Kunstforum Museum (2023), The Art Museum Riga Bourse, Riga, Latvia (2022), The Siauliai Aušros Museum, Lithuania (2022) and The Osthaus-Museum Hagen, Hagen, Germany (2022). Slonem is also represented in countless galleries throughout the globe. His flair and admiration for far-flung destinations has been a staple of his life since childhood. Slonem was born in 1951 in Kittery, Maine, and his father’s position as a Navy officer meant the family moved often during Hunt’s formative years, including extended stays in Hawaii, California and Connecticut. He would continue to seek out travel opportunities throughout his young-adult years, studying abroad in Nicaragua and Mexico; these eye-opening experiences imbued him with an appreciation for tropical landscapes that would influence his unique style. After graduating with a degree in painting and art history from Tulane University in New Orleans — where he also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, studying alongside the likes of Alice Neel and Alex Katz — Slonem spent several years in the early 1970s living in Manhattan. It wasn’t until Janet Fish offered him her studio for the summer of 1975 that Slonem was able to fully immerse himself in his work. His pieces began getting exhibited around New York, propelling his reputation and thrusting him into the city’s explosive contemporary arts scene. He received several prestigious grants, including from Montreal’s Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cultural Council Foundation’s Artist Project, for which he painted an 80-foot mural of the World Trade Center in the late 1970s. He also received an introduction to the Marlborough Gallery, which would represent him for 18 years. As Slonem honed his aesthetic, his work began appearing in unique, contextual spaces. By 1995 he finished a massive six-by-86-foot mural of birds, which shoots across the walls of the Bryant Park Grill Restaurant in New York City. His charity work has resulted in dozens of partnerships, including a wallpaper of his famous bunnies designed specifically with Lee Jofa for the Ronald McDonald House in Long Island. Slonem has brought his work to outdoor audiences through a series of landmark botanical garden exhibitions. In 2024, the world-premiere of Huntopia: Bunnies, Birds & Butterflies opened at the San Antonio Botanical Garden — the first major exhibition of outdoor sculpture by Slonem, featuring monumental ceramic and glass-tiled installations across 38 acres. Building on that success, in 2026 his largest exhibition to date, Hunt Slonem: Bunnies, Birds & Butterflies, opened at the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden, transforming 66 acres with 37 large-scale installations and more than 150 works through September 2026. Slonem continues to draw great inspiration from history, forging palpable connections to the past through his art. His popular portraits of Abraham Lincoln reframe the historic figure as a pop-art icon. Yet Slonem’s most ambitious project has been his mission to save America’s often forgotten historic homes. Realizing too many of the country’s architectural gems have fallen into disrepair, Slonem has found himself drawn to these national landmarks, inspired by the depth of their age and old-world beauty. Among his accomplishments are the restorations of Searles Castle in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the Lakeside and Albania Mansions of Louisiana; and the Scranton Armory and Charles Sumner Woolworth’s Mansion in Scranton, Pennsylvania and Belle Terre, South Kortright, New York. His latest endeavor Seaview Terrace in Newport, Rhode Island. Numerous books and monographs have chronicled Slonem’s art, including Hunt Slonem: An Art Rich and Strange (Abrams Publishing, 2002) and The World of Hunt Slonem by Dominique Nahas (The Vendome Press, 2011), Bunnies (Glitterati Inc., 2014), Birds (Glitterati Inc., 2017), Butterflies (Glitterati Inc., 2022), The Bigger Picture (Scala Arts Publishers Inc., 2021). His studios and homes have been profiled in The Spirited Homes of Hunt Slonem (Gibbs Smith Publishing, 2023), World of Folly (Assouline Publishing, 2018), When Art Meets Design (Assouline Publishing, 2014) and Pleasure Palaces: The Art and Homes of Hunt Slonem (PowerHouse Books, 2007).