Sam Herman

Herman headed the Glass Department at the Royal College of Art (RCA) from late 1967 to 1974. He had his first major UK exhibition in 1967 curated by Henry Rothschild at Primavera. In 1971 he had an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1974, he had his first major exhibition in Germany, curated by Wolfgang Kermer in Stuttgart.^[11] His former students include firstly the previous Head of Department, Michael Harris - who left the position which Sam took over to form Mdina Glass in Malta - Peter Aldridge Clifford Rainey, Jane Bruce, Pauline Solven, Annette Meech, Steven Newell and Jiri Suhajek.^[12] Herman left the RCA when he was invited by the South Australian government to found the glass studio at Jam Factory Workshops. He spent the next five years in Australia, creating glass sculpture, exhibiting and conducting workshops. When he returned to London in 1979, he took a position as head of the glass area at the Buckinghamshire College of Higher Education (now Buckinghamshire New University), which later named him head of the Ceramics and Glass Department at the school. His tenure ended in 1990, when he took a consulting position with the Cristalleries Val Saint Lambert in Belgium. In addition to his teaching positions in England, Herman taught workshops in the United States at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (1970), the University of California at Berkeley (1971) and California College of Arts and Crafts (1972–73).^[13]

Herman's work has been collected by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide; the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne; the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth; Viennese Glass Museum in Vienna, Austria; Frauenau Glass Museum (Donation Wolfgang Kermer),^[14] Germany; the Düsseldorf Art Museum in Ehrenhof, Düsseldorf, Germany; the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, and The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum, Bedford, UK.^[15] Sam Herman featured in the exhibition "Glass, Light, Paint & Clay: Objects from the Graham Cooley Collection" at the Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery from 28 October to 14 December 2017. The catalogue (ISBN 978-1-78808-185-6) features an interview with Sam (conducted by Graham Cooley at the Swindon Museum and art gallery on 27 October 2016) ^[16] describing his life and work.