Oliver Herring's work "An Age for Hands" has been acquired by Everson Museum of Art

BANK is pleased to announce that Oliver Herring's An Age for Hands (1996) has been acquired into the collection of the Everson Museum of Art. The Everson Museum of Art, which opened in 1968, traces its predecessor's history back to 1897, when it was founded by the well-known art educator George Fisk Comfort, who later helped establish the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As the first museum designed by internationally acclaimed architect I. M. Pei, the Everson’s design has been credited with launching Pei’s world-famous career. The Everson is also the first museum to dedicate itself to the collection of American art and is known for its specialized ceramic art and video art collections.

 

Inspired by the ongoing AIDS epidemic, An Age for Hands is a war memorial that references historic battle paintings that fill national museums. Hand knit and queer, defiant and armor-like, this monumental work was painstakingly woven like an ongoing inscription of names lost over time. The piece was first shown at the Guggenheim Soho in 1997.

 

“Rather than allowing us to fall-back on a passive interaction with an institutionally-bounded text, these works literally reconfigure the document as monument by allowing representations of corporeal reality to represent the story of a life; they exist simultaneously as site of painful absence and sensual presence - a site where the tyranny of history is exchanged for the freedom of phenomenological discovery, a site where even mourning and recovery are possible.” (Excerpt from Mannheimer Kunstverein Catalog Essay, 1994)

December 28, 2024