Art Exhibition | Mimi Herbert: FOLDS

Mimi Herbert’s mesmerizing manipulation of acrylic gives us sinuous, elegant shapes that catapult her medium to exquisite fine art. Today this 87-year-old pioneer lives and works in the Washington DC, area, drawing from decades-deep expertise maximizing her environment with local materials. She was a prize winning bronze caster in India, a 3-D illustrator in Indonesia, a Life Drawing master in El Salvador, and far beyond. Creating in her circa 1970s contemporary woodland home studio, Herbert says she's driven "by a very vivid imagination."

FOLDS is a thirteen piece collection of the artist’s recent works, some big, all bold, celebrating her twists, tucks, and creases in zestful colors. She often piles separate elements, but it is her solid and translucent combinations that have a spellbinding effect. The neon's edges lead the viewer around the design like race car tracks.

Every sculpture begins its life on paper, with Herbert draughting her designs on blank newsprint, then gathering it up to create elevations, pleats, flips and turns. After selecting a color, she places an acrylic sheet on a vast light table filled with dozens of high intensity bulbs calibrated to heat the material so it’s pliable enough for shaping. It takes Herbert and other pairs of trained and trusted hands to lift, push and prod the plastic into the precise shapes the artist has carefully modeled. Herbert has turned out major museum works from the homemade contraption. Commissioned for America's Bicentennial by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, she created four massive flags, among them a 165-foot-long banner!

Well known for her emblematic drape of the venerable Corcoran (among America's first art museums) the artist is also celebrated for her tailored modern squares and rectangles. Slightly puffed and folded, these are clean, smooth, and monochromatic , and carry that Washington Color School minimalism that had gained important traction, locally and across the globe. Among the finest of these is the artist's signature "Red Triplet," 1974, on display at the National Gallery of Art’s new Atrium.

Herbert's work is also in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Renwick Museum, The National Gallery of Art, The Phillips Collection, Chattanooga’s Hunter Museum, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and more, along with private collections worldwide. A distinguished scholar, Herbert’s intellect and artistry have been enriched over the years by Fulbright, Ford Foundation, US Government, American University, University of Pennsylvania, and Syracuse University grants.

We are delighted to host Mimi Herbert’s first gallery solo exhibition in more than a decade.

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