Daniel Heyman, Lewis Center for the Arts

Lecturer in Visual Arts

Photo credit: Terri Moore

About

Daniel Heyman uses his art practice to respond to a wide range of stimuli from world events to his observations of the natural world, his empathy for others and his love of material challenges. For many years his primary focus was an investigation of the results of governmental use of personal and communal violence as a political tool, making images about abuse and torture of innocent Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and other prisons by the U.S. Armed forces, the covering up of sexual violence in the U.S. military, the intergenerational trauma that results from racist governmental policies as lived out in Native American and African American communities in North Dakota and Pennsylvania. For all of this work, Heyman traveled extensively, doing over 100 interviews with a variety of witnesses, recording testimonies verbatim in paintings, prints and drawings that now live in public collections around the U.S. In 2014 Heyman moved to rural Rhode Island, and his work shifted as he observed and recorded the wonders of the natural world right out his back door. He has deepened his interest in Japanese papermaking and made 14 trips to Japan to work in the Awagami Paper Factory, making not only traditional sheets of kozo, gampi and mitsumata paper but also exploring the world of paper pulp painting that resulted new works made into folding screens, scroll and hanging banners. He continues to make woodblock and intaglio prints as well as paint in his Rhode Island studio.

Many museums and libraries have acquired portfolios of Heyman’s work including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Getty Library Special Collections, Yale University Art Gallery, Baltimore Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Princeton University Art Museum, Hood Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, RISD Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Heyman was a 2009 Pew Fellow in the Arts and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow. His work has received on-going support from Princeton Summer Research Grants, RISD Professional Development Grants, and he was awarded an Independence Foundation Grant and a James Reynolds International Fellowship. He has been an artist in residence at Awagami Paper Factory, Tokushima, Japan; Nagasawa Art Project, Awajishima, Japan; Herzaliya Mizkan, Israel; Fine Arts Work Center, Massachusetts; Dartmouth College Artist in Residency Program; Yaddo, MacDowell, and Millay.

Heyman’s work has been shown nationally in exhibitions from Richmond, Virgnia, to McMinnville, Oregon, to Amarillo, Texas, and Grand Forks, North Dakota, in large and small institutions. He has been a visiting artist in colleges as diverse as Flagler College in St. Agustine, Florida, Minot College in North Dakota, to Tyler School of Art and Brown University in the northeast.

Heyman’s work was featured in “Male Desire: Homosexual Desire in American Art,” (Harry Abrams, ’05) by Jonathan Weinberg, and has been reviewed in many publications including The New York Times, Art in America, The Chicago Tribune, National Public Radio, The Philadelphia Inquirer, City Paper, and Boston Globe, among others. His work was featured in Esquire in 2008 and the 2009 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading. Heyman holds degrees from Dartmouth College and the University of Pennsylvania and currently teaches at Princeton and the Rhode Island School of Design. He grew up on Long Island.