Michelle L. Herman

Untitled (Technology / Transformation)

Kinetic sculpture; 3D printed resin, found object, mirrored acrylic

"This piece considers language in a few different ways. One as a cultural signifier, as the gesture of the hand, recalls that of Adam from the 'Creation of Adam' by Michelangelo. I am interested in the way simple gestures—such as an outstretched hand—can signify so much.

In another way, the idea of 'the artist’s hand' is typically discussed as a mark of craftsmanship or skill. Because of my physical disability, this concept has always been an emotionally complex one. I juxtapose the concept of ‘skill’ (the hand) with a material that in many ways represents the removal of the artist’s hand—that of 3D printing."

– Michelle L. Herman

About the artist

Michelle L. Herman

Michelle Lisa Herman is a Washington, DC-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans theoretical and philosophical research, feminist and disability politics, comedy, and conceptualism. Herman's book, Let's Talk Art (2021), is a collection of artist oral history interviews completely fabricated by machine learning technologies. The text was generated by refining a subset of the Generative Pretrained Transformer 2 open-source artificial intelligence software. It was refined using one-thousand actual interviews with artists comprising 54,665,994 'tokens' within its dataset.

Herman has shown internationally in group and solo exhibitions at venues such as the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in Spain, Cinéma du Foyer Saint-François in Bourges, France; the Corcoran, The Smithsonian Institution, The Kennedy Center, Hillyer Art Space, and the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, DC; Goggleworks in Reading, Pennsylvania, the Arlington Art Center in Virginia, and Visarts in Rockville, Maryland.

Herman’s work has been featured in Hyperallergic, New American Paintings, The Washington Post, NPR, and East City Arts. Herman is an alumna of the Maryland Institute College of Art (MFA, 2020) and the Sparkplug artist collective sponsored by the DC Arts Center.