Michael Sherman
Michael Sherman is a painter, illustrator, and teacher born and raised in Ohio, now based between Copenhagen and New York.
MessageMichael Sherman is a painter, illustrator, and teacher born and raised in Ohio, now based between Copenhagen and New York. He trained at RISD (2003) and has exhibited landscape paintings and drawings in solo and two-person shows in Basel, Los Angeles, and New York. A public work of his was installed at 125th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan for ten years.
He has held residencies at Cill Rialaig Arts Center (Ireland), CHASHAMA's Spaces Program, and the National Academy Museum (both New York), and was a resident artist with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's SUCASA creative aging program and a multiyear recipient of LMCC Creative Learning Grants.
Michael co-runs demeter a studio in Copenhagen built with Chuva Featherstone on the idea that art-making could be transparent, shared, and interdisciplinary. Here he teaches drawing, painting, Procreate, and a tools workshop to adults and contributes to classes for children and teenagers. This draws on fifteen years of teaching at universities and cultural centers in New York and London and his training across the U.S. and Italy.
He lives in New York and Copenhagen with his partner, Julia, and their two children.
For inquiries, reach out at [email protected]
Statement
Drawing and painting are a language to me — ideas, material, process, and time, all in one gesture.
I grew up in Ohio with one hand in the dirt, often holding a tool, building things, learning from my farmer grandfather, Willard, how manmade and natural systems work. That's stayed with me: I'm drawn to the place where the manmade and the natural meet, where randomness and order collide. A pile of stones becomes a cairn, a ruin, or a monument, depending on how it's stacked. A helicopter dropping water on a fire and a boulder balanced on another boulder are, to me, the same image — force meeting material, both about to become history.
I think of this as geo-symbolism: geological time, human structure, and personal memory compressed onto one surface. I'm interested in legacy objects — the things left behind for someone else to interpret, the way we now interpret pottery shards and standing stones. What survives, what gets carried forward, what becomes a relic, whose story gets told.
Two current bodies of work are focused on these questions: Rocks and Meta-Morphic.
Meta-Morphic approaches these questions through the head: a form that has been cast, carved, and copied across the entire history of image-making, carrying with it questions of likeness, beauty, and ownership. Each of the thousand drawings in the series is a single iteration in the long chain of reproduction. These are not copies in a diminished sense, but a way of holding form up to scrutiny again, asking what it still means after so many hands have shaped it.
Rocks approaches the same question from the opposite direction. A boulder or a cairn predates human history and will outlast it; painting one is a way of working at a scale that puts the present into proportion — locating a single moment, a single gesture, within something much older and much larger.
I make this work for people looking for a thread back to where they came from. I want them to stand in front of a painting or drawing and feel more connected — to a collective past, and to each other — even if that happens by seeing themselves as interconnected with an object hanging on a wall.