| Sam Herman | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 25, 1936 Mexico City, Mexico |
| Nationality | US citizen; resides in Great Britain |
| Other names | Samuel J. Herman |
| Occupation | Glass artist |
Sam Herman is a contemporary glass artist. An early student of Harvey Littleton, Herman is credited as one of the founders of the Studio Glass movement in Great Britain.[1] He was seminal in spreading the idea of the movement through his teaching positions in England, (at the Royal College of Art and the Buckinghamshire College of Higher Education), and Australia (at the Jam Factory Workshops in Adelaide) and through the exhibition of his own sculpture in glass. Through the years the artist has resided and established his personal studio in London, England (1979–90), South Australia (1974–79). From 1993 to the present he has maintained studios in Spain and London.[2]
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Samuel J. Herman was born in Mexico City in 1936; his family moved to the United States when he was nine years old. From 1955 to 1959 Herman served in the U.S. Navy.[3] He became a US citizen in the early 1960s.[4]
Herman’s art education was first taken at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington where he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1962. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he studied under Professor Harvey Littleton. He was awarded the MFA from that institution in 1965. Upon receipt of a scholarship, Herman afterward traveled to Great Britain for study at the Edinburgh College of Art from 1965 to 1966. After this he studied at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London from 1966 to 1967,[5] when he was appointed the head of the Glass Department.[6]
In 1969 Herman established a workshop, The Glasshouse, in London. It was the first glass studio of its kind in Great Britain.[7] In 1974 he traveled to Australia, where, in cooperation with the South Australian Craft Authority, he set up the glass area at Jam Factory Workshops, Inc. in Adelaide. It was Australia's first hot glass studio.[8] In 1979 Herman returned to England and set up his own glass studio in London, where he worked until 1990.[9]
Herman headed the Glass Department at the Royal College of Art (RCA) from late 1967 to 1974. His former students include firstly the previous Head of Department, Michael Harris - who left the position which Sam took over to form Mdina Glass in Malta - Pauline Solven, Annette Meech, Steven Newell and Jiri Suhajek.[10] Herman left the RCA when he was invited by the South Australian government to found the glass studio at Jam Factory Workshops. He spent the next five years in Australia, creating glass sculpture, exhibiting and conducting workshops. When he returned to London in 1979, he took a position as head of the glass area at the Buckinghamshire College of Higher Education (now Buckinghamshire New University), which later named him head of the Ceramics and Glass Department at the school. His tenure ended in 1990, when he took a consulting position with the Cristalleries Val Saint Lambert in Belgium. In addition to his teaching positions in England, Herman taught workshops in the United States at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (1970), the University of California at Berkeley (1971) and California College of Arts and Crafts (1972–73).[11]
Herman’s work has been collected by the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide; the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne; the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth; Viennese Glass Museum in Vienna, Austria; Glasmuseum Frauenau (Sammlung Wolfgang Kermer)[12], Germany; the Düsseldorf Art Museum in Ehrenhof, Düsseldorf, Germany; the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.[13]