Art & Art History: Frames of Reference Series, Tom Sherman

Join the Department of Art & Art History for the Frames of Reference series, an annual program of artists' films and videos. The event is programmed and organized by Jeremy Drummond, associate professor in visual and media arts practice.

Frames of Reference showcases some of the most creative, challenging, thoughtful, and visionary artists working in film, video, and alternative media today. Programs feature artists and artworks that resist conventions and ideologies of mainstream media; explore creative, innovative approaches to narrative and experiments in time-based media; and embrace unique viewpoints, perspectives, or frames of reference.

Learn more about the Frames of Reference series.

The first program features film screenings followed by a Q&A with Tom Sherman.

Tom Sherman was born in Michigan and received a B.F.A. degree from Eastern Michigan University. In 1972 he immigrated to Toronto where he helped establish A Space’s video production and exhibition programs. He was also active with Art Metropole and numerous artist-run venues throughout the 1970s, publishing his conceptual/literary texts and developing his practice as a video performance artist. In 1980 he was one of the founding editors of Fuse magazine. That same year he represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in the groundbreaking “Canada Video” exhibition. In 1983 the National Gallery of Canada mounted “Cultural Engineering,” a ten-year survey of his video, installations and text works.

His interdisciplinary work has been featured in hundreds of international exhibitions, festivals, broadcast and Web venues, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Musee d’art contemporain and Festival International des Film sur l’Art (Montreal), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Musee d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, LUX Cinema (London), Montevideo (Amsterdam), In Video (Milan), Kunstradio and Wiener Konzerthaus (Vienna), Ars Electronica (Linz), Documenta X (Kassel) and Sender Freies Berlin. His published monographs include “3 Death Stories” (Art Metropole 1976), “1 Traditional Methodology for Processing Information” (Art Gallery of Ontario 1978), “The Banff Information Base,” co-authored with Jan Pottie (Walter Philips Gallery, Banff Centre 1981), “Cultural Engineering” (National Gallery of Canada 1983) and “Before and After the I-Bomb” (Banff Centre Press 2002).

Sherman was the founding Head of the Canada Council’s Media Arts Section in 1983. In 1991 he was appointed the Director of the School of Art and Design at Syracuse University. In 1993 he began performing and recording with the Austrian artist Bernhard Loibner in the duo Nerve Theory. He received the Bell Canada Award for excellence in video art in 2003 and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2010. He is a professor at Syracuse University, teaching video production and media art history in its Department of Transmedia. A dual citizen of Canada and the U.S., he splits his time between Syracuse, New York, and his Canadian home on the South Shore of Nova Scotia.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History, School of Arts & Sciences, and University of Richmond Museums.