Norman L Hoberman was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1928. After an “uneventful childhood”, he attended Hamilton College (a “mistake”), where he attended a no-credit painting studio and art history class with the “great modernist Carl With” [sp?]. He received a BA in Art and Philosophy in 1948. With “much ambivalence”, he went on to Harvard Law School, where he “did well but had no sense of calling”. He was an editor of the Harvard Law Review from 1949 to 1951. He graduated cum laude in 1951 (LLB).
In 1951, he married Mary Ann Freedman. From 1951 to 1953, he was stationed in Newfoundland, where he served as a judge advocate in the US Air Force, achieving a rank of First Lieutenant. His job was “mainly trial counsel in courts-martial”. The Hoberman’s first daughter Diane was born in 1953.
Hoberman wrote, “I decided at this point that I did not really want to practice law. I had always painted and was interested in architecture.” He enrolled in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard in December 1953, and graduated (M.Arch) in 1957. Upon graduation, he received the AIA Medal for Highest Excellence in Architecture, and the Julia Amory Appleton Traveling Fellowship. He briefly worked (June 57 to March 58) as a designer with Harrison & Abramovitz in New York, before leaving in March with his growing family (son James Perry arrived in 1954 and Chuck in 1956) for Europe on the Appleton Traveling fellowship. He had a sculpture studio in Rome, and designed a home in Biot, France.
The family returned in November 1958 and moved to Darien, CT, where they lived for several years while Hoberman designed and built their permanent home in Greenwich CT. At this time, Hoberman began his work as a sculptor in earnest. “I was very interested in developing a process of direct modeling with concrete to eliminate formwork and casting problems. [I] developed a variation of Nervi’s ferro-cemento process of constructing sculpture of several layers of reinforcing [metal lath] first and then forcing cement mortar through the reinforcing.” This work continued until 1964.
From 1959 to 1961, he worked as Chief Designer and Office Manager at Pedersen & Tilney’s New York office. In 1961, the firm’s entry into a national competition for a memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a collaboration with (former classmate) Joseph Wasserman, with sculptural design by Hoberman) received first prize, resulting in much acclaim and controversy. The winning entries were displayed at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. Ultimately, however, the project was never built, due to opposition from Congress and Roosevelt’s family.
In 1961, Hoberman, as part of the 10/4 group, exhibited work at a gallery in New York. The group’s members were Walter Gaudnek, Hoberman, Ray Schultz and Richard Speyer. Hoberman exhibited four large concrete sculptures, while the others showed paintings. About the work, the artists wrote, “OUR WORK IS AFFIRMATION. WE EXPRESS BASIC PASSIONS AND IMPULSES THROUGH ORDERED SYMBOLS OF PLASTIC FORCE”.
Also in 1961, Hoberman entered a partnership with Joseph Wasserman, forming Hoberman & Wasserman, Architects. Based in New York City, the firm provided architectural services for large-scale housing (including many projects for the New York State Urban Development Corporation), public recreation facilities, and a range of private projects. A second daughter, Meg, arrived in 1963.
From 1963 to 1965, Hoberman was an Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University. In 1964, he began making paintings and 3D painted wall pieces. He took part in exhibitions of architecture at Yale University in 1964, the Architectural League and the American Federation of the Arts in 1966, and the Whitney Museum in 1970. In 1970, he designed a mural for the Tompkins Park Recreation Center in Brooklyn, NY. He served on the Greenwich Planning & Zoning Commission from 1972, and became Chairperson in 1978, remaining until 1982. He received the Bard Award from the City Club of New York in 1973.
In about 1973, he began a series of large geometric constructions, finished in fiberglas and epoxy resin. In 1975, as Hoberman and Wasserman wound down, he formed a new partnership with fellow architect John Gallagher. Hoberman & Gallagher was based first in Greenwich, Ct., and then in Stamford, designing and building large-scale housing throughout New England, both for outside clients and as projects of its own. In 1975, he received the Greenwich Arts Council Design Award for an elderly housing development, and in 1976-77, a Design Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1982, Hoberman and his wife traveled to China, where he became fascinated by early Neolithic ceramics. Upon their return, he built a new studio with a large kiln, and took a studio ceramics course, becoming a master ceramicist, a practice which he continued for several decades. Other series included Fitted Wall Pieces (1990-93) and Wall Reliefs (1993-94).
Hoberman had a one-person show of ceramics and wood reliefs at the Stamford Museum & Nature Center in 1995. In 1996-97, he began a series of life-size figurative sculptures made of metal lath, the same material he’d used as a substructure for his concrete sculptures decades before. He received a “Best in Show” Award from Silvermine Guild for his ceramics in 1997. Another series of sculptures, the Indeterminaates, were produced from 1998 to 2000.
With an increasing interest in landscape, the couple took a master gardener course in 2001, and he began to focus on large-scale ceramic garden sculpture. A series of Segmented Wood pieces was produced from 2004 to 2007.
In 2006, Hoberman began to develop a process of using three-dimensional scans to make portrait heads and busts using a CNC router. He had a one-person exhibition at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich in 2009.
Norman Hoberman died on July 4, 2015.