LACMA opens Boardman Collection
Sondra Sherman is Associate Professor of Art and Head of the Jewelry and Metalwork Program at San Diego State University, CA. She received her MFA from the Academy of Fine Art, Munich GERMANY, and her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA She has been the recipient of many awards including Individual Artist Fellowships from the Rhode Island Council on the Arts (2002, 2005) Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Emerging Artists Fellowship (2001), Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (1990) the Mid-Atlantic Regional National Endowment for the Arts (1989) as well as a Fulbright Scholarship for Study Abroad (1988). Sherman’s artwork is included in the following public collections: the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the Museum of Arts and Design, NY, the Racine Art Museum, WI, the Renwick Gallery-National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, DC, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, RI, and the City Museum of Turnov, Czech Republic. Her work has been published in Europe and the U.S., including, including the recent Jewelry by Artists: 1940-2000 (Boston MFA 2010) and is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum in the Donna Schneier collection exhibition.
Exhibitions
2018 Upside Down in Paradise
2011 Found Subjects
2007 Anthophobia:Fear of Flowers
2005 Seven Types of Ambiguity
Publications
2015 Found Subjects with essay by Toni Greenbaum
2009 Anthophobia: Fear of Flowers
Artist Statement
“Countless books exist on the topic of jewelry, but Found Subjects – Sondra Sherman’s homage to the literary – is jewelry on the topic of books. Thirteen interfaced, and interconnected, presentations morph installation, object, graphics, vocabulary, and syntax into the essence of narrative, prompting questions of relationship, placement, and projection. As inspiration for these contemplative – yet spirited – works, Sherman considers the pictorial, along with cultural, elements of select books’ design, color, typeface, and illustrations to accumulate data for site-specific jewelry “portraits.”
Open books are mounted on randomly-placed pedestals, recalling the lecterns upon which old dictionaries reposed. Wandering through the maze, one marvels at the multitude of sizes, symbols, hues, intents. Ambiguous combinations summon private worlds of words, ideas, beliefs, information. Sherman doesn’t read the books; her associations are visceral, visual, instinctive, imperative. She invents places where jewelry resides physically, or — after removal — ghost-like, speaking for mute text, functioning as formal trope, departing from the literal.”
excerpt from essay by Toni Greenbaum in Found Subjects.
