Born in 1945 in Kalamazoo, MI, Robert Huff grew up on the west coast of Florida in a family of builders who spent their spare time hunting, camping, and fishing. These activities were to fuel his passion for the man-made and the natural worlds. After earning his MFA from the University of South Florida in 1968, he moved to Miami to accept the position of sculpture professor in the visual arts department of the then Miami-Dade Community College South Campus (now Miami Dade College Kendall Campus). In 1979 he became chair of the department, a position he held until he retired in 2005. Over the years he exhibited widely with his work included in various public and private collections. He received numerous individual artists grants and public commissions. He took part in residencies and exchanges including two trips to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. He loved to travel and explore and took immense pleasure in the natural environment. He thought of himself as a landscape artist, but his was a personal landscape that he abstracted and filled with various impressions and memories. Materials driven, Huff delighted in the challenges of new products and processes. He had a great appreciation for problem solving and was skilled at adapted new techniques. His mastery of a broad range of media provided him the freedom and flexibility to work in a cross-disciplinary manner to formulate his ideas. Art critic and historian Helen Kohen once referred to him as a “colorist, architect, inventor, chart maker, tracker.” Over the years, he built a number of three-dimensional tower pieces in wood and in metal. Towers also appear in his two-dimensional work. In the natural world, man-made towers like watch towers, fire towers, bell towers, shot towers, and cooling towers, sentinel or guard structures often function as navigational tools providing critical direction or orientation. Guard loosely references many towers that Huff had seen or steered by, but may also draw from his fascination with wooden crab traps.