In honor of the opening of Carmen Herrera: I Am Nobody! Who Are You?, Arturo Herrera: You Are Here, and Erin Shirreff, please join us for a panel discussion with Arturo Herrera, Erin Shirreff, and a Carmen Herrera scholar, moderated by SITE SANTA FE’s Phillips Executive Director, Louis Grachos.

About the Presenters
Arturo Herrera (b. 1959, Caracas, Venezuela) explores formal strategies of fragmentation, recomposition, and repetition through a diverse body of media—including wall paintings, collage works, felt sculptures, and glass. His colorful abstractions obscure and reveal areas of opaque and negative space, introducing a sense of ambiguity to the visual information being conveyed. Sequences of color, line, and shape gesture towards familiar figures while resisting any full commitment to symbolic legibility. Herrera is interested in the pictorial and conceptual possibilities of this defamiliarization, and how specific contexts of image-making and viewing can be uprooted and redefined.
Arturo Herrera received his BFA from the University of Tulsa (1982) and his MFA from the University of Chicago at Illinois (1992). Following his graduation from the University of Tulsa, Herrera began collecting found imagery from books, cartoons, and illustrations for his early collage work. The hybrid imagery produced by these constituent forms provoked ambiguous, subversive contexts for previously familiar symbols. His interest in this type of visual juxtaposition continued to evolve and further integrate Modernist creative fields, including dance. Herrera’s embrace of materials such as felt and paint in the mid-1990s led to diverse interpretations of space and form through soft sculptures and wall murals, respectively. Later bodies of work foregrounded dynamism and movement as a significant point of formal and conceptual experimentation. Herrera continues to engage the generative tensions found in abstraction, and the ambivalent states between legibility and obfuscation, action and stillness, and the familiar and the unknown.

Herrera’s work has been exhibited widely, including solo shows and permanent wall paintings installed at sites around the world. Two monumental, site-specific paintings are currently on public view in London for the 12 edition of Sculpture in the City. His work was most recently the subject of major solo exhibitions Arturo Herrera: Between at The Contemporary Dayton, OH (2023) and Constructed Collage at Ruby City, San Antonio, TX (2022-23). Herrera’s long-term wall installations can be seen in The Bass Museum of Art, Miami, FL; Bloomberg European Headquarters, London; and Tate Modern, London. His work is included in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; and Tate Modern, London. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, ArtPace San Antonio, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the DAAD, Berlin. Herrera lives and works in Berlin.

Erin Shirreff’s work has been featured in recent solo exhibitions at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass (2021-22); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019); Palazzo De’Toshi, Bologna, Italy (2018); Kunstalle Basel, Switzerland (2016); Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) (2016); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2015).
Recent institutional group shows include: On the Basis of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (2021); La Machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux, Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal (2020); Hinge Pictures, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2019); Le Lieu du film, KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Brussels (2018); Slow Objects, The Common Guild, Glasgow (2017); Gray Matters, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2017); Photography Today: Distant Realities, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2016); L’Image volée, Fondazione Prada, Milan (2016); and Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015).

Shirreff’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; LACMA; the National Gallery of Canada; Centre Pompidou; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; the Whitney Museum of American Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Dallas Museum of Art; MCA Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. Shirreff (b. 1975) received an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2005, and lives and works in Montreal.