Home | Whitney Sherman Full Bio
Trained as a photographer, self-taught in illustration and design, Whitney Sherman’s work has been represented in American Illustration, Communication Arts, AIGA, Society of Publication Design, Society of Illustrators of NY and Los Angeles, Print Regional and Print casebooks, as well as the Art Director’s Club of NY, SF, DC and Baltimore, and the Bank Street College of Education Children’s Book Committee, NY. She has served as a lecturer, panelist and moderator on numerous occasions, recently including the panel on editorial art Through Our Eyes with Steve Brodner, Marshall Arisman and Steven Guarnaccia at ICON3 in Philadelphia; a panel on education with Joe Morse, Craig Frazier, Paul Rogers, Steven Guarnaccia and Mark Murphy called Future Tense for ICON4 in San Francisco; a lecture entitled Drawn to Letters about teaching typography to illustrators and a Closing Keynote entitled Babblelab/MICA at the 2006 Educators Symposium at the Society of Illustrators NY. She was also a Hallmark Residency lecturer at the University of Kansas.
At ICON4, Sherman interviewed comics artists Sara Varon, James Kochalka and Craig Thompson in a session entitled Illustrated Novels. She also designed and produced 2 tours: The Book Lovers Tour of a letterpress demo at One Heart Press and lecture by Michael Bartalos at the San Francisco Center for the Book; and the Eisenstadt Tour of over 1000 historic illustrations in the personal collection of Ben & Jane Eisenstadt in San Jose, CA. At the 2008 Educator’s Symposium at the Society of Illustrators, NY, she interviewed Jordin Isip, Noel Claro and Rachel Salomon in a session entitled The New Business of Illustration.
Her web portfolio and stock images can be seen at: www.rappart.com, www.whitneysherman.com and www.altpick.com. She is represented nationally by Gerald & Cullen Rapp, Inc., NY.
Recent exhibitions include Picturing Health, [with Melinda Beck, Guy Billout, Mark Ulriksen, Frances Jetter, Norman Rockwell, Peter de Sève and others] The Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA; Reenactment, Current Gallery, Baltimore, MD; Dialogue: The Fine Art of Conversation [a traveling exhibition to the Susan & Peter Barnett Gallery, Santa Monica, CA and Studio Fly Contemp Art Gallery, Charleston, SC]; Beyond Commerce at Weber State University, Ogden, UT [with Ed Fella, Jordin Isip, Michael Schwab, Lanny Sommese, Jennifer Morla, Paula Scher, Juliette Borda, James Victore, Cynthia Von Buhler, J. Otto Seibold, Michael Mabry, Stefan Sagmeister, Mark Ulrikson and others]; Venn Diagram at MICA [a 25 year retrospective]; Women in Illustration, The Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA; The Art of the Stamp at the National Postal Museum, Washington, DC; the 50th Memorial Annual Exhibition Wakaime Art School, Tokyo, Japan; The Art of Transportation at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission Gallery, Oakland, CA and Twenty Years of Cricket Covers at the Art Institute of Chicago. Other notable exhibitions include Self-Identity at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem which traveled to Axis Gallery/Tokyo and the Design Museum/London; Corporate Design, an international exhibit of design & identity at Fachbereich Gestaltung, Weisbaden, West Germany; Illustrators West 38, Mendenhall Gallery, Pasadena, CA; Illustrators West 34, University of California, Irvine, CA and Illustrators 40, DFNA Gallery, Pasadena, CA, and on numerous occasions the Annual Competition at the Society of Illustrators Gallery of American Illustration in NY.
Sherman curated the exhibition Seamless : culture meets culture. Artists include Yuko Shimizu, Christopher Silas Neal, Sara Varon and Andrew Liang at Varnish Fine Art Gallery/SF. The exhibit opened in conjunction with ICON4, the national Illustration Conference in San Francisco. She designed and curated her 25 year retrospective Venn Diagram which was mounted at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore; and the Maryland College of Art & Design, Silver Spring, MD.
Her work is commissioned by the NY Times, Business Week, Forbes and other national magazines as well as by design firms such as Tolleson Design/SF, Pentagram/SF, Ronn Campisi Design/Boston, and Karne-Prickett/Chicago; national institutions such as the Ad Council and the American Red Cross; and publishers such as Clarkson Potter, Random House and St. Martin’s Press.
She has served twice as juror for the Society of Illustrators of NY’s Annual Competition and for the 3x3 Student Competition. Sherman wrote and recorded the audio essay Influence [of culture] with Federico Jordan for the Society of Publication Designers conference in Laredo TX; and gave a 3 part interview for ICONIC which can be heard at the website Illustration Mundo: www.illustrationmundo.com/audio/artist/19, www.illustrationmundo.com/audio/artist/29, and www.illustrationmundo.com/audio/artist/32.
Sherman’s Breast Cancer Research stamp has raised over $54 million dollars for research, is the first semi-postal issue and longest running stamp in the history of the US Postal Service issues, and is the first US Postal Service issue to be issued in a foreign country.
She is contributor to The Education of an Illustrator and Educating Illustrators by Marshall Arisman and Steve Heller and Designer’s Self-Image, an international showcase of identity graphics published by Joshua Marcus, PBC International Library of Applied Design. She proposed and initiated the exhibition Comics on the Verge at MICA and served as the Public Programming mentor, and served as Project Director and Public Programming Director on Another Voice : Political Illustration from The Progressive, 1982-1999.
Reviews include the NY Times Book Review/ Children’s Book section, Graphic Design: USA, Baltimore Magazine, Communication Arts and the Washington Post Book World and Art Times.
Whitney Sherman is one of 100 artists from around the world asked to illustrate and design the cover for the 1000 Journals Project, a transcontinental collaboration. Journal covers, pages, sightings and commentary can be found at www.1000journals.com. The 1000 Journals Project is being made into a feature length documentary film. Sherman is one of 65 artists invited to participate in Heaven + Hell, a hard cover art book surveying visual and verbal concepts of heaven and hell; in Dialogue: The Fine Art of Conversation, a collection of lost letters, scribbles, notes and visual art on correspondence; and in Good Fortune, a themed promotional book for Serbin Communication’s Directory of Illustration. These three publications were curated, designed and published by Mark Murphy Design, San Diego, CA.
Along with her studio work, Sherman is the Chair of Illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Co-Director of Dolphin Press & Print @ MICA. She is on the Board of Directors of the Educators Symposium at the Society of Illustrators in NY and served on the Board of Directors for the national Illustration Conference ICON4 in San Francisco, July 2005 and as President of the Board for ICON5 in New York, July 2008. She is serving on the ICON6 Advisory Board.