Linda Herritt

Linda Herritt | Good Girl, installation, Rule Denver CO, 2017

Linda Herritt primarily focuses on text-based drawings and wall installations constructed of common materials like tape, yarn, and fabric. The work uses a distorted grid derived from digital wire-frame images, found or created, as the architecture supporting short passages of text. The text lists aspects of a specific cultural phenomenon, creating a field that reveals underlying affinities. Subjects range from a listing of bands playing in Brooklyn and a compendium of traditional Chinese brushstrokes, to a collection of prescription drug side effects. The scraps of material used to build the installations mimic drawing materials and techniques, like charcoal lines or crosshatching. Various illusions of depth combine with sculptural elements to interact with the spatially warped compositions. The materiality of the form often overtakes the process of reading: the tension between viewing and reading becomes apparent as one processes simultaneously the knitted web-like skin of the surface and the linear, left to right orientation of the text.

Linda Herritt taught painting for the University of Colorado in Boulder from 1982 through 2000 and began showing her installations and drawings at RULE Gallery in 1996 before relocating to New York. She is the recipient of a Brooklyn Artists Fund Grant for 2017. Her installations and drawings have been exhibited in one and two-person exhibitions at the Smack Mellon and the Boiler (Pierogi), Brooklyn, (1K Project Space, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Pierogi, Brooklyn, New York; the San Francisco Art Institute, California; Florence Lynch Gallery, New York; The Frist Center for the Arts, Nashville, Tennessee; and Art&Idea, Mexico City, Mexico, among others. Her group exhibitions include shows at Storefront and Pierogi in Brooklyn; the Drawing Center, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam; and Galería OMR, Mexico City. Fellowships include an NYFA Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, and an NEA Sculpture Fellowship. She participated in the International Artist in Residence Program in Vienna, with US residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Art/Omi, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe New York Studio Program. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times and Art in America. In 2016, she participated in the Workspace Residency at Dieu Donne in New York. Herritt lives and works in Brooklyn.