Hobart Brown

Hobart Ray Brown, (February 27, 1934 – November 7, 2007) was an American sculptor and the founder of Kinetic Sculpture Racing.

Hobart Brown was born in Hess, Oklahoma, to a fifteen-year-old mother who migrated across country to California on the back of her husband's motorcycle. He later described it as his classic Okie experience, mirroring the great migration captured in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and other stories of the Dust Bowl years.

Brown went to high school in Los Angeles a couple of classes after Marilyn Monroe, whom he remembered by her real name and describes as "a quiet, plain little thing - not at all what she became later."

After a stint as an airplane mechanic with the U.S. Army in Cambrai - Fritsh Kaserne Darmstadt, Germany, and time spent running hot rods with his friends on local empty roads, he decided in 1962 to become an artist and moved to Humboldt County, California. Arriving in 1962 with his wife and two sons, he immediately opened the first of several Hobart Galleries; the first in Eureka, California, others in Trinidad and finally Ferndale, California.

Over the years, the Hobart Galleries has represented more than 150 local artists - launching several careers and providing much needed exposure to younger artists by adding them to an established stable of better-known names.

Hobart had four children, three boys and one girl.

Hobart was instrumental in helping Morris Graves settle in his beautiful home nestled in the hills outside Loleta, California.

During northern hemisphere winters until 2006, Hobart migrated to Australia, where he was first artist-in-residence at Happ's Winery, later at Leeuwin Wine Estates in Margaret River, Western Australia where his public welding studio on their patio and display of his art in the winery itself were popular stops on the hourly tours.

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