Tom Sherman (artist)

Tom Sherman (born August 5, 1947) is an American-Canadian artist working in video, audio, radio, performance, sculpture and text/image. He is also a writer of nonfiction and fiction. He is a recipient of Canada's Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Art. He is a professor of video art at Syracuse University.

Sherman was born in Manistee, Michigan. As a boy he was a committed naturalist, studying and collecting insects with a particular fascination for Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths). His public school education was complemented by his experimentation in amateur radio and electronics (he was licensed as WN8CES), shortwave listening and medium wave DXing. This early involvement with communications technologies evolved into cultural pursuits. He earned a BFA degree from Eastern Michigan University in 1970, majoring in sculpture.

In 1972 Sherman immigrated to Canada, and later became a Canadian citizen. He settled in Toronto and began working at A Space, one of the first artist-run centres in Canada. He established (with Lisa Steele) a video facility for artists at A Space from 1972-75. Throughout the 1970s he developed and established his practice as a visual and media artist making and showing conceptual text-image works, performance art and video art, and sculptural installations.

During this time, he was also a regular on-air contributor to CBC Radio's Morningside with Peter Gzowski and As It Happens with Barbara Frum. From 1976-78 he directed and edited scores of music videos for Nightmusic, a television talk show on the arts on TVOntario, Toronto. He also curated and produced Afterimage, a 13-week, half-hour program of experimental film and video art on TVOntario. In 1978 he was a researcher and writer for Fast Forward, a TVOntario series on the digital revolution, broadcast extensively on PBS in the USA.

After a brief stint as a visiting professor in 1979-1980 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, he was a founding editor (with Clive Robertson and Lisa Steele) of Fuse Magazine in Toronto. Sherman represented Canada at Venice Biennale in 1980 in "Canada Video," curated by Bruce Ferguson of the National Gallery of Canada, featuring his video art along with video by Lisa Steele, Colin Campbell, General Idea, Pierre Falardeau and Julien Poulin.

In 1981 Sherman moved to Ottawa, taking a position as Video Officer within the Visual Arts Section at The Canada Council. In 1983 he founded the Media Arts Section of The Canada Council, becoming its first Head of Section, and establishing Council's first grant programs for computer-integrated media. That year the National Gallery of Canada mounted "Cultural Engineering", a ten-year survey of his video, installations and writing, curated by Willard Holmes.

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