Born in 1931, Bud Hopkins graduated from the Linsly Military Institute (now Linsly School) in 1949 and Oberlin College in 1953. Hopkins first displayed his artistic abilities as a child recovering from a long-term illness. He began to create sculptures of ships made out of modeling clay. Hopkins settled in New York after recieving his degree and has had a residence there ever since. In 1963, Hopkins was selected by the Columbia Broadcasting System as one of the 15 painters featured in the network's first television special on American art. In 1958, Art News picked him as one of 12 Americans for exhibition in Spoleto, Italy, in the "Festival of Two Worlds." His Unique artistic style has won him a humber of fellowships and awards. In 1972, the West Virginia Arts and Humanities Council awarded him its Commission Prize. In 1976, he received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Painting and in '79 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. Hopkins also won a special project grant from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1982. Hopkins' work has appeared in many exhibitions across the country and he is represented in many important private and corporate collections around the nation. His art has been featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Bronx Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum, Corcoran Gallery, Guggenheim Museum, Queens Museum in New York, and the Public Library of New York. Across the United States, it has been seen in the Smithsonian Institution and the Library Congress in Washington, D. C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the San Francisco Museum, among others.