Adriane Herman (born 1966, New York, NY; lives Cape Elizabeth, ME) holds a BA from Smith College, Northampton, MA and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Herman is Chair of printmaking, Maine College of Art, Portland. Herman’s work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally at venues, including the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Adam Baumgold Fine Art and International Print Center New York, both New York; Portland Museum of Art, Rose Contemporary Gallery and SPEEDWELL Projects, all Portland, ME; as well as the Dalarnas Museum, Falun, Sweden. Herman was featured in The Print Center’s 69th ANNUAL Competition. Herman’s work has been published in A Survey of Contemporary Printmaking, The Best of Printmaking: An International Collection, Can I Come Over to Your House?: The First 10 Years at the Suburban, Printmaking at the Edge and Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall. Herman is the recipient of a Rocket Grant, Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City, MO and the Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS and has completed artist residencies nationally and as well as in Mexico and India. Herman’s work is in numerous collections, including of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Statement from the Artist:
I explore accumulation and release in our physical and emotional landscapes, leveraging the power of witnessing to facilitate release. My Wreckage Salad monotypes depict my waxing and waning municipal woodpile – a compost pile rife with manifestations of human intentions, accomplishments, procrastination, and all the other stuff of life, including its completion. A tour of the local recycling facility yielded Out of Sorts, a show at SPEEDWELL Projects in Portland, ME featuring borrowed bales of plastic, cardboard, and aluminum; and a wall of wearable and mounted fabrics entitled Complicity and Consumption Contemplation Benches. The installation pressed pause on the recycling process, and encouraged viewers to contemplate their patterns of consumption as well as personal, cultural and global implications of material excess and disposability.