Sorman named as Padnos Chair

ALLENDALE, Mich. – A multi-media artist with roots in the Midwest has been selected as the faculty member to fill the first fully endowed chair at Grand Valley State University.

Steven Sorman, who was born in Minnesota in 1948 and now resides in upstate New York, will occupy the Stuart and Barbara Padnos Chair in Art and Design for the academic year 2007-08. He is currently at Grand Valley as a visiting professor.

With $1.5 million pledged to establish and endow the chair in 2006, Stuart B. Padnos, president of the Stuart and Barbara Padnos Foundation, has provided permanent support for the academic rigor of the Art and Design program.

Stuart Padnos said that his late wife Barbara would have been pleased to be part of this milestone for art at Grand Valley. "Steven Sorman is just right for Grand Valley, both for his creativity and for his commitment to mentoring students," said Padnos.

“The faculty and I are thrilled to have Steven Sorman joining us,” said Patricia Clark, interim chair of the Department of Art and Design. “He brings fantastic expertise as an artist to share with our students.”

Sorman has previously taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he built a papermaking facility, directed a graduate printmaking seminar at Indiana University, and been on the faculty (at large) at Vermont College and Bennington College. He has also lectured and been a visiting artist at numerous academic institutions and worked abroad, under the aegis of the U.S. Information Agency.

“I’m so pleased to have this opportunity,” said Sorman. “As a working artist, I’ve spent most of my life working full time in the studio, independently for the last 30 years. I really feel a need to do this at this time in my life and with my experiences. I’ve realized that in some instances sharing even a day or an hour at the right time in an artist’s developmental years can have a lifelong effect.  I remember the people that did that for me, so I want to reciprocate.”

Ever since Sorman earned a BFA in painting from the University of Minnesota in 1971 he has worked in a variety of media. His pieces have been included in many solo and group exhibitions held throughout the U.S. and the world, including Sweden, Japan, India, Seoul, New Zealand, Manila, Hong Kong and Singapore. His work has also been selected for many corporate and museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Power Museum of Art in Sydney, Australia, and the Singapore Art Museum.

Known primarily as a painter and printmaker, Sorman is fascinated with combining a wide variety of media and likes to try anything.

“Steven is really expert in many technical and material processes, so he has done all the demonstrations this semester,” said associate professor Jill Eggers, who team-taught a painting course with Sorman. “His warm, confident, and open manner immediately won the trust of the students, and they feel so comfortable with him. He makes himself freely available to them, and helps them with every idea, question, material, or technical issue they raise.”  

This fall, Grand Valley’s Director of Galleries and Collections Henry Matthews will curate a show of Sorman’s work at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids. An opening reception with the artist is scheduled for Tuesday, November 6, and he will give a lecture about his work on Thursday, November 15. The exhibition will run until November 18.