Sherman Fleming seeks to create projects that identify cultural and social mechanisms that resonate with his processes of visual art making and performance art practice and collaboration, combined with his experiences as a public arts manager bridging artists, youth and communities to create collaborative public art works.

Sherman Fleming has exhibited nationally as well as internationally including Dakar, Pretoria and Amsterdam. Currently, Fleming’s performative work is included in a traveling exhibit, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Sherman Fleming, a 2013 Franklin Furnace Grant recipient, has lectured at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Design and has created public art projects for the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program.

The Sphinx Returns is a curated season of performance art and contemporary performance. The season investigates the artist as myth maker and performance art and contemporary performance as the mythologies of our time, setting the course for a history of the future.

The Sphinx Returns is a return to questioning, mythology, and new ideas, asking how do we encourage and gain new ways of seeing and understanding. The inclusion of short form actions, endurance, durational, performance for video, installations and sound work will offer insight into artistic practice as a means towards a new mythology.

Allowing mystery to pervade the space of the now instigates active and real-time relationships between the artist and the public. The Sphinx Returns is the moment when the experience of being alive reveals itself through the act of being present.

Curator’s Statement:
“My mission is to encourage dialogue between national and international artists and the public by presenting a range of diverse and thought provoking work that reflects the community at large, both those familiar and unfamiliar with performance art and contemporary performance.”