Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) was born in San Lorenzo, Italy. He immigrated to the United States in 1930 and enrolled at Cass Technical High School, where he studied art and design and learned the trade of designing jewelry. He continued his training at the Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts and then at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he met Walter Gropius, Edmund Bacon, and Ray and Charles Eames. During his time at Cranbrook, he sent prints to the Guggenheim for evaluation. The acquisitions director purchased all one hundred of them, nineteen of which would be featured in the museum's next exhibition. Karl Nierendorf of the Nierendorf Gallery in New York subsequently supported Bertoia with a stipend and the logistical means to produce gallery shows of his prints and jewelry.

In 1939 Bertoia opened a metal workshop where he taught metalwork and jewelry design. In 1950 he moved to Pennsylvania, where he established a studio and began to work with Hans and Florence Knoll, the iconic furniture designers. Bertoia designed a number of chairs for the Knolls that became known as the Bertoia Collection, and these iconic wire-and-steel forms remain among the most recognized designs of postwar American modernism. In the mid-1950s he turned his attention solely to sculpture, and beginning in 1956 he showed for decades with the Fairweather Hardin Gallery in Chicago and the Staempfli Gallery in New York.

In the 1960s Bertoia embarked upon creating his sound sculptures, sometimes called Sonambient or "tonal" sculptures, one of the most important innovations in the realm of sculpture in the twentieth century. It is believed that Bertoia had an epiphany when he struck a metal rod while working with it and was taken with the sound it produced. Bertoia's focus was on working with various alloys and metals to develop specific tonalities, and the air and space around the works were central to his thought process. His arrays of upright rods, tuned to produce shimmering, otherworldly sounds when moved by hand or breeze, transformed sculpture into a genuinely sonic art form.

Today Bertoia's works are held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among many others. His sound sculptures especially continue to fascinate and attract numbers of ardent art patrons and collectors. Bertoia died in Pennsylvania in 1978, and the Harry Bertoia Foundation continues his legacy today. Yet it is the sound of his sculptures that will live on most enduringly in the memories of his followers and supporters.