Oliver Herring
Sculptor, Painter, Performance Artist
Artist-in-Residence for the Department of Art
Nature of the Residency: Task & Basic – Mr. Herring will visit the University of Maryland campus a total of three times on February 12 & 13, March 25 and April 2 & 3. Oliver Herring, Artist-In-Residence in the Department of Art presents Task in conjunction with The Art Gallery. An improvisational art-making event, Task brings together undergraduate and graduate students from the Department of Art as well as students from other disciplines at the university to create a unique site-specific contemporary artwork. Simple visual oriented tasks devised by the artist become catalysts for performance by the participants. When the first artist-assigned actions are completed, participants invent their own tasks for others. The unpredictability of the performance is inherent to its process: the artwork takes shape according to the interests and creativity of those on stage as well as the relationships they form with one another.
Following the Task performance, Herring will conduct studio visits with Department of Art MFA students and give a public lecture.
During the artist's second visit to campus in late March, he will work with the Task participants to create a website that chronicles the performance as well as facilitates ongoing dialogue within the community of performers.
The artist's residency will conclude in early April with a public event. This event will coincide with the opening of new video works from Herring's Basic that will be on display in The Art Gallery's back space April 2-26, 2008. These artworks were developed from collaboration between the artist and strangers, performed before a video camera. Basic, the product of these collaborations, is a series of playful videos that will be presented as a large-scale projection.
Public Presentation: February 13th, 2008 – Artist's lecture featuring an overview of Mr. Herring's work including a viewing of select videos. Art/Sociology Bldg. Room ASY2203, 5PM.
April 2nd, 2008 – Culminating public performance event coinciding with the opening of Mr. Herring's video installation Basic in the University Art Gallery. Art/Sociology Bldg. Gallery and Atrium
Biographical Information: Oliver Herring was born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1964, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BFA from the University of Oxford (Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art), Oxford, England, and an MFA from Hunter College, New York. Among Herring's early works were his woven sculptures and performance pieces in which he knitted Mylar, a transparent and reflective material, into human figures, clothing, and furniture. Since 1998, Herring has created stop-motion videos and participatory performances with 'off-the-street' strangers. He makes sets for his videos and performances with minimal means and materials, recycling elements from one artwork to the next. Open-ended and impromptu, Herring's videos have a dreamlike stream-of-consciousness quality; each progresses towards a finale that is unexpected or unpredictable. Embracing chance and chance encounters, his videos and performances liberate participants to explore aspects of their personalities through art in a way that would otherwise probably be impossible. Herring has received grants from Artpace; New York Foundation for the Arts; and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, among others.
If you have questions, contact the UM Department of Art.
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