Tom Holland, sculptor, painter and printmaker, was born on June 15, 1936, in Seattle, Washington. He grew up in San Mateo, California and, after high school, studied at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon (1954-1956); the University of California Santa Barbara (1957) and the University of California Berkeley (1957-1959) where he received his MFA degree. While at Berkeley, Holland studied with David Park and worked as his assistant.

Holland was awarded a Fulbright Grant in 1960 which allowed him to live for a year in Santiago, Chile. He was also awarded NEA Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He taught at the University of California Los Angeles (1968-1970) and the San Francisco Art Institute (1973). Early in his career he was a painter but, by 1969, Holland had begun to explore the possibilities of fiberglass and aluminum. He was included in the 1969 Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Painting, December 1969-February 1970, at the Whitney Museum of American Art; New Options in Painting at the Walker Art Center; and California Prints at the Museum of Modern Art, plus numerous other exhibitions.

Holland’s works are represented in the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, and the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington. Holland is featured in Thomas Albright’s “Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980.”