Tom Knechtel was born in Palo Alto, California in 1952.  In 2002 he had a 25-year retrospective entitled On Wanting to Grow Horns, which opened at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery in North Carolina before traveling to the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, The Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu, and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. He has had other solo exhibitions at Grant Selwyn Fine Art, the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, PPOW Gallery in New York and Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles.  Knechtel has been included in numerous group exhibitions at venues including The Drawing Center, New York, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut, Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His work is in the permanent collections of The Berardo Collection, Sintra Museum of Modern Art, Portugal, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Orange County Museum of Art and The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu. Tom Knechtel artist lives and works in Los Angeles.