Born in Chicago to a working-class family, Lynn Herring came to New York in her 20’s to pursue a career as an advertising art director and to develop her studio practice as a visual artist in the city that produced many of the contemporary artists that inspired her.
Living in the NYC metropolitan area gave Lynn the opportunity to study at the School of Visual Arts while working at her advertising job. She ended up taking a break from her advertising career and graduated from SVA with honors in 2008 with a BFA in Sculpture.
After graduating from the School of Visual Arts, Lynn began showing her video installations at a funky little gallery on the Lower East Side and had the remarkable opportunity to show her videos in the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey before her eventual move to the Hudson Valley.
Upon arriving in Kingston, NY in 2016, Herring found studio space in Kingston’s Brush Factory. Here was an amazing 100-year old industrial space filled with artists and entrepreneurs quietly living and making their work.
Herring’s studio work is influenced by her work in the advertising industry where bold simple imagery and witty short headline copy is used to execute complex strategies. Her sculpture and print work have a hard-edged and clean graphic aesthetic on the one hand and a wonky cartoon-like form and line quality on the other hand. It is as if Donald Judd and Dr. Seuss collided with each other.
Her most recent work is a reengineered Tic Tac Toe game designed to “Make America Relate Again”. Created with organic crooked-shaped, brightly-colored wood Xs and Os and using a more complicated wonky-shaped game board, Herring’s game is an object used to help many different kinds of people to connect for a playful and sane moment in this time of cultural and political toxicity.
Her interest in minimalism, contemporary culture, social psychology, spirituality, play and humor inform Herring’s work.
Herring has been exhibiting her work since 2005 and has been included in several juried shows including the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey, the WAAM museum in Woodstock, NY, the Visual Arts Gallery in Chelsea and at Wired Gallery in High Falls, NY.
Herring recently completed her MFA studies with honors at SUNY New Paltz in a multi-disciplinary program with a concentration in printmaking and sculpture. She is now taking her XOX game on the road. So, keep on the lookout for her in your local diner, coffee shop, park, gallery or museum. You never know where she may pop up to play a game with you.
The book mentioned in the interview was Slaughter House-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
