Syracuse University Art and Design professor Tom Sherman wins prestigious national award from Canada for video art.

Syracuse University Art and Design professor Tom Sherman wins prestigious national award from Canada for video art.April 07, 2004Amy Schmitzaemehrin@syr.edu

The Canada Council for the Arts recently honored Tom Sherman with the 2003 Bell Canada Award, a $10,000 prize. Sherman, a citizen of Canada and the United States, is the first winner in the 13-year history of the award to live in the United States and to have dual citizenship. The award recognizes Sherman for his “exceptional contribution” to Canada’s heritage of using video as a medium for creating contemporary art. Much of his work deals with the relationship between people and machines.

Sherman, who was born in Michigan in 1947, has been involved in the video-art scene in Canada since he immigrated there in 1972, two years after graduating from Eastern Michigan University. Eleven years later, the National Gallery of Canada presented a 10-year retrospective of his video, installations and writing. Over the past three decades, his work has been featured at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Montevideo in Amsterdam, among others.

He was appointed director of the School of Art at SU in 1991 and is teaching video production, media history and theory. His fourth book, “Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment,” was published in 2002. It contains about two decades’ worth of his writings.