Exhibition: Sondra Sherman FTDs at Velvet da Vinci Art Jewelry and Sculpture Gallery, San Francisco

This new series of steel brooches titled 'FTDs' continues Sherman's hybrid abstractions of traditional flower corsages using medicinal herbs. This exhibition opens December 1, with an artist's reception on Friday, December 4, from 6 to 8 p.m.

Sondra Sherman's interest in medicinal language and adornment has inspired this new group of steel corsages, in which aphrodisiacs and hallucinogenic plants are the botanical references. Florists' Transworld Delivery is the common understanding of the term FTD and Sherman plays off of that notion in the titles of the individual brooches borrowed from commercial corsages, such as 'Pure Grace', 'Slow Dance', and 'Enchantment'. The composition and alternately refined and raw materiality of the pieces however are also inspired by a less familiar use of FTD, Formal Thought Disorder a term used in psychiatry to describe a pattern of disordered language. Sherman's interest in the psychological and social affects of jewelry flourishes in this confluence of sources and expressive materiality.

Sondra Sherman was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1958. She is a studio metalsmith and Associate Professor of Art at San Diego State University, CA. She has previously taught at Rhode Island College, SUNY New Paltz, Rhode Island School of Design, and Savannah College of Art and Design. Sondra's work is exhibited and published in Europe as well as the U.S. She has been the recipient of various awards including a Tiffany Foundation Emerging Artists Grant, PA Council on the Arts Individual Artists Fellowship, Mid Atlantic NEA Fellowship grant, and a Fulbright Scholarship for study abroad. Sondra received the Diplom Degree from the Munich Academy of Fine Art, Munich, Germany. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Art and Design NY, RISD Museum, Turnov City Museum in the Czech Republic, and the Myers School of Art at the University of Akron Ohio.