Tom Sherman is an American-Canadian artist working in video, audio, radio, performance, sculpture and text/image. He is also a writer of nonfiction and fiction. He is a recipient of Canada's Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Art. He is a professor of video art at Syracuse University.
Early life
Sherman was born in Manistee, Michigan. As a boy he was a committed naturalist, studying and collecting insects with a particular fascination for Lepidoptera. His public school education was complemented by his experimentation in amateur radio and electronics, shortwave listening and medium wave DXing. This early involvement with communications technologies evolved into cultural pursuits. He earned a BFA degree from Eastern Michigan University in 1970, majoring in sculpture.
Work with organizations
In 1972 Sherman immigrated to Canada, and later became a Canadian citizen. He settled in Toronto and began working at A Space, one of the first artist-run centres in Canada. He established a video facility for artists at A Space from 1972-75. Throughout the 1970s he developed and established his practice as a visual and media artist making and showing conceptual text-image works, performance art and video art, and sculptural installations. During this time, he was also a regular on-air contributor to CBC Radio's Morningside with Peter Gzowski and As It Happens with Barbara Frum. From 1976-78 he directed and edited scores of music videos for Nightmusic, a television talk show on the arts on TVOntario, Toronto. He also curated and produced Afterimage, a 13-week, half-hour program of experimental film and video art on TVOntario. In 1978 he was a researcher and writer for Fast Forward, a TVOntario series on the digital revolution, broadcast extensively on PBS in the USA. After a brief stint as a visiting professor in 1979-1980 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, in Halifax, he was a founding editor of Fuse Magazine in Toronto. Sherman represented Canada at Venice Biennale in 1980 in "Canada Video," curated by Bruce Ferguson of the National Gallery of Canada, featuring his video art along with video by Lisa Steele, Colin Campbell, General Idea, Pierre Falardeau and Julien Poulin. In 1981 Sherman moved to Ottawa, taking a position as Video Officer within the Visual Arts Section at The Canada Council. In 1983 he founded the Media Arts Section of The Canada Council, becoming its first Head of Section, and establishing Council's first grant programs for computer-integrated media. That year the National Gallery of Canada mounted "Cultural Engineering", a ten-year survey of his video, installations and writing, curated by Willard Holmes. In 1986 Sherman was appointed an International Commissioner for the Venice Biennale: Sherman, Don Foresta, Tomasso Trini and Roy Ascott curated a major exhibition of digital, network art called Ubiqua: Art, Technology and Informatics at the 1986 Venice Biennale. In 1988-89 he worked with Simon Fraser University to develop and launch a research institute about digital technologies for the arts, the Centre for Image and Sound Research. In 1991 he was appointed Director of the School of Art at Syracuse University in central New York, USA. He continues to teach in the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University, specializing in video art production and media art history.
Art: exhibitions, performance and publishing
Sherman's visual and media art has been featured in scores of exhibitions, festivals and broadcast venues, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Images Festival, the National Gallery of Canada, Elektra and the Festival International des Film sur l'Art, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Galerie René Blouin, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Ars Electronica, Wiener Konzerthaus, Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Documenta X and Kasseler Dokfest, LUX Cinema and Tate Britain, Montevideo, the Impakt Festival, In Video, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, and Transitio_MX. In 1997 he founded Nerve Theory, a recording and performance duo with Viennese musician and composer Bernhard Loibner, and was an on-air contributor to many of radio art programs on Kunstradio, the Austrian Broadcasting Network, and other radio venues internationally from 1997 to 2018. Sherman began publishing essays and articles in 1972 and has published widely in magazines, print anthologies and web-publications. He has published six monographs, including two anthologies of his texts, Cultural Engineering and Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment. He has been active in the electronic digital network culture since the early 1980s, actively publishing and interacting on listservs and contemporary social media, including the video file-sharing websites YouTube and Vimeo.
Books
As author
3 Death Stories, Art Metropole, 1978.
"Animal Magnetism", Only Paper Today, Vol. 4, No. 10, 1978.
"1 Traditional Methodology for Processing Information ", Metropolitan Toronto Library/Art Gallery of Ontario, June 1978.
