Linda Herritt

Linda Herritt (b. 1950, Columbus, OH) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work uses language as both image and material. Working across large-scale fabric installations, drawing, and monoprint, she enlarges, distorts, and layers text until its legibility begins to give way to visual form. Her source material has ranged from lists of bands playing in Brooklyn, prescription drug side effects, lipstick colors, and dog commands to weather phenomena and literary texts. Recent installations incorporate passages from Charles Dickens, while her works on paper draw from weather, natural phenomena, flowers, and other found phrases. Across these bodies of work, Herritt considers what happens when language is removed from its original context and reorganized through scale, repetition, distortion, and structure.

Herritt taught painting at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1982 through 2000 and began exhibiting with RULE Gallery in 1996 before relocating to New York. Her work has been presented at Smack Mellon and The Boiler/Pierogi, Brooklyn; The Drawing Center, New York; San Francisco Art Institute; the Frist Art Museum, Nashville; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; Arti et Amicitiae and 1K Project Space, Amsterdam; and Galería OMR, Mexico City, among others. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Rockefeller Foundation Grant, NEA Sculpture Fellowship, and Brooklyn Arts Fund Grant. Her residencies include Yaddo, MacDowell, Art Omi, the Marie Walsh Sharpe New York Studio Program, the International Artist in Residence Program in Vienna, and the Workspace Residency at Dieu Donné. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times and Art in America. Herritt lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.