Artist Talk: Arturo Herrera and Erin Shirreff

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.

Erin Shirreff’s work has been featured in recent solo exhibitions at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachutes (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).