Adriane Herman
Adriane Herman studies accumulation and release in our physical and emotional landscapes.
She has had solo exhibitions at Adam Baumgold Gallery (NY); Western Exhibitions (Chicago), Kansas City Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art; Center for Maine Contemporary Art; Interlochen Center for the Arts; Kiosk Gallery in Kansas City; Rose Contemporary in Portland and Ocean House Gallery in Cape Elizabeth. Group exhibition venues include The Dalarnas Museum (Falun, Sweden); Portland Museum of Art; The Brooklyn Museum; Chapel Street Gallery at Yale University; The Ulrich Museum (Wichita), The H&R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute and Paragraph Gallery (both Kansas City), Mount Airy Contemporary (Philadelphia), and the International Print Center New York.
Herman’s work is in collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art; The Progressive Corporation; The Walker Art Center; The Ulrich Museum, and Sprint, Inc., and been written about in publications including: The New Yorker; Art on Paper; Art in Print; artforum.com; The Kansas City Star; The Portland Press Herald, and New Art Examiner, as well as the following books: A Survey of Contemporary Printmaking; Printmaking at the Edge; The Best of Printmaking; and Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall.
Herman holds a B.A. from Smith College, an M.F.A. from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Level II Wilton Method Cake Decorating certificate. She has been an artist in residence in Varanasi, India; Weymouth, Nova Scotia; Yarmouth, Maine; Kansas City; and Coatepec, Mexico, and has lectured at over fifty institutions.
Born in New York City, Herman currently lives in Southern Maine, where the local recycling center offers her inspiration in forms such as waxing and waning piles of discarded wood scraps that she likens to a compost pile rife with manifestations of human intention, aspiration, accomplishment, procrastination, and all the other stuff of life, including its completion.
Image: “Wreckage Salad (Blue High Chair),” 2021, monotype, 21.5 x 28.75 inches
Website:
www.adrianeherman.com/
Residency Period:
Jun 2022–Jul 2022
Project Statement:
I explore accumulation and release in our physical and emotional landscapes, suspending, amplifying, and readying for redistribution the infectious energy embedded in gestures of letting go while simultaneously struggling with my own surfeit of stuff.
My “Wreckage Salad” monotypes are inspired by the municipal wood pile and photos I take each time I release household waste, entitled “Towns Mounds.” Manifesting consistency through constant change, the pile witnesses perennial growth and loss, absorbing whatever visitors shuck, whether overtly broken or seemingly serviceable enough to lead the next “dumpster” to violate the facility’s no scavenging rules. The prints my “dump and document” ritual yield are themselves the products of scavenging. Due to the vast quantity and variety of items needed to simulate the pile, I invite others to hand color and cut shapes from tracing paper that collectively become matrices that transfer water-soluble pigment to rag paper. I enjoy the aleatory process of composing two prints at a time at the press under time pressure, and deciding which prints work and which go to the scrap heap as they emerge from drying boards. Five years into the series, my adrenal system requests a less pressurized process of decision making, the results of which will pay homage to not just an idea of, or reference to, a municipal woodpile, but instead will hopefully capture a particular moment in the life of this collection of specific traces of specific lives. Rather than hierarchize disparate ways of working, I seek cyclical change toward intentionality and unification of image, hopefully yielding at least a small stack of prints that compel both as objects and images. I plan to utilize monotype, collagraph, drypoint on plexi and Spudnik’s Vandercook to press images conceived as ink drawings of the woodpile into paper, enjoying the novelty of knowing what they may look like before coming off the press.
