Born in 1958, Greensboro, NC.

EDUCATION
Rhode Island School of Design, BFA, 1982.
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 1980.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
Museum, Wilmington, NC, June 9-September 4; Greenville Museum of Art, Greenville, NC, September 9-October 31, 1994.
"New Prints and Monotypes," Peden Gallery, Raleigh, NC, November/December 1993.
"Finding the Forgotten," North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, March/May, 1991.*
"Hudson River Editions, Etchings and Monotypes by John Beerman,"
Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY, December/February 1988.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
"Divining Nature," Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, WinstonSalem, NC April 11July 5, 1998.*
"Realism After Seven A.M.," The Hopper House, Nyack, NY, October/December, 1996.
"Changing Horizons: Landscape on the Eve of the Millennium," Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY, July 28-September 29, 1996.
"Today," Rockland Center for the Arts," West Nyack, NY, March 3-24, 1996.
"Rocklandia," Hopper House, Nyack, NY, July 1995.
"Printmaking in America, Collaborative Prints and Presses, 1960/1990," Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ, AprilMay 1995, traveled to Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. (book published in conjunction with show).*
"American Academy Invitational Exhibition," American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, March 6April 2, 1995.
"Paintings from New Jersey Collections," New Jersey Center for Visual Arts, Summit, NJ, November 1994January 1995.*
"Inspired by Nature," Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY, September 25December 24, 1994.*
"The Nature of Beauty," Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, Greensboro, NC, September 18November 11, 1994.

Selected Bibliography:
Linda Johnson Dougherty. "Divining Nature," Art Papers, September 23, 1998.
Geoff Edgers. "Landscapes, past and presence," The News and Observer, June 1998.
Vivian Raynor, "Surveying Realism in Celebration of Hopper," The New York Times, November 24, 1996.
"An Artists Studio," Country Living, October 1996, p.127.
Ed Bumgardner. "Landscape Artist tries to Capture the Magic," Winston Salem Journal, March 24, 1996, p. E1.
Frances MacDougall. "Landscapes of the Mind," Southern Accents, March/April 1996, p. 1028.
Dixie Kellar. "John Barmen's Inner World," Rockland Review, October 18, 1995.
Anthony Crisafull. "John Beerman," Cover, May 1995.
Jacqueline Humphrey. "Art on Paper," Greensboro News & Record, November 25, 1994.
Vivien Raynor. "The Sublime, the Modern and the Literal in Views of the Land," The New York Times, November 13, 1994.
Leigh Pressley. "A Living Archive," Greensboro News & Record, November 13, 1994.
"Profile: Hudson River Editions," The Print Collector's Newsletter, Vol. XXV, no. 2, MayJune 1994, p. 6566.
"Technique, aesthetics make duo show worth a look into Somerhill Gallery," The Herald Sun, April 24,1994.
Alexandra zu Knyphausen. "Pferde, Die Hilfe Bringen," Hamburger Abendblatt, January 29, 1994.
Chuck Twardy. "The Hills Are Alive," News and Observor, November 19, 1993.
Linda Johnson. "Inside Viewing Outside," Spectator, November 11, 1993.
Jonathan Goodman. "John Beerman," ArtNews, November 1993.
Vivien Raynor. "On the Sense and Sensibilities Of Rockland County Artists," The New York Times, April 11, 1993.
Vivien Raynor. "A Curator's Eye for Imagery ...," The New York Times, May 31, 1992.
Vivien Raynor. "30 Contemporary Take Over a Rockland Hunting Lodge," The New York Times, September 29, 1991.
Vivien Raynor. "A Show of Works that Define or Simply Allude to Landscape," The New York Times, October 13, 1991.
Max Halperen. "John Beerman's Twilight Mysteries: The New Romantic Landscape at NCMA," Ashville, NC, The Arts Journal, April 1991, p. 79.
"Art Museum Showcase Beerman," Chapel Hill Newspaper, February 28, 1991, p. B7.

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Center For Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH; Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, NY; Chemical Bank, New York, NY; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Dow Jones and Company Incorporated, New York, NY; Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, Maine, MA; GE Corporation, Fairfield, CT; General Mills, Minneapolis, MN; Governor's Mansion, Raleigh, NC; GreenPoint Bank, Flushing, NY; InterMetro Industries, Wilkes Barre, PA; Henry Kaufman & Co., New York, NY; Johnson & Johnson, NJ; Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; Nomura Securities, New York, NY; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine MA; Progressive Corporation, Cleveland, OH; Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; Reader's Digest Association, Pleasantville, NY; Shearson Lehman Hutton, New York, NY; South East Bank of Florida, Miami, FL; St. John's Museum, Wilmington, NC; St. Luke's Hospital, New York, NY; Time Warner, Inc., New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, NC

AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS
Pollock/Krasner Foundation Award, 1998.
Subscription Prize, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1986.
Visual Artist Fellowship in Painting, Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY, 1984.
Scholarship to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine, 1980.

John Beerman (b. 1958) has spent more than 35 years creating luminous landscapes that celebrate the beauty and quiet power of the American landscape. Drawing inspiration from the Hudson River School and the Luminists, his paintings are distinguished by their masterful use of light, color, and atmosphere, transforming familiar scenes into timeless meditations on place.

A North Carolina native, Beerman's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Beerman has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Award and the Yaddo Artist Colony Fellowship. His work included in the collections of numerous museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

JOHN BEERMAN (BORN 1958)

John Beerman’s landscapes are luminous, tranquil, and at times a bit mysterious. A keen observer of nature, he once explained his motivation: “I find solace in looking at the landscape. I think it’s a human thing. We all do.” His locations are wide-ranging and include the mountains of North Carolina, the beaches of South Carolina, the Hudson River, Texas ranchland, and Tuscan hillsides.

A native of Greensboro, North Carolina, Beerman dates his early interest in landscape painting to summers spent as a child on Lake Toxaway in the western part of the state, called by some “The Beautiful Sapphire Country.” A distant uncle who was a Sunday painter was there as well, and it was because of him—and the lack of television—that Beerman became interested in painting. Disappointed by what the high school in Greensboro had to offer, Beerman went to a small, co-educational boarding school in Vermont where he took art and photography classes.

He proceeded to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1982. Two years before, he had attended the summer program of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture located on 350 acres in central Maine. An idyllic setting, the school brought together aspiring students and established artists. David Driskell, a seasonal resident of Maine, was an alumnus and served on the faculty at various times as well as on the Board of Governors and the Advisory Committee.

By 1983 Beerman had settled in Nyack, New York, along the Hudson River twenty-five miles north of Manhattan. He became a studio assistant of Jasper Johns who spent most of the year in Stony Point, further up river. Johns is masterful with a variety of media, including encaustic, oil, and numerous forms of printmaking; likewise, Beerman is proficient, indicating that he likes the process and the “craft” of painting. The following year he was a studio assistant for Alfonso Ossorio, a Filipino-American abstract expressionist who owned property near the beach on eastern Long Island. In addition to these positions, Beerman was awarded the Yaddo Artist Colony Fellowship, a multi-disciplinary artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, and two grants, in 1998 and 2014 from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

In 1990 Beerman attended the Tamarind Institute, located in Albuquerque, which was founded in 1960 to foster fine art lithography. Established artists such as Josef Albers and Ruth Asawa had taken advantage of highly trained master printers who work side by side with visiting artists to work out some of the technical details of lithography. While there, Beerman created an impressive and complicated twenty-four color lithograph of a southwestern landscape.

Beerman spent the better part of three decades living near the Hudson River—the home of America’s first “school” of landscape artists, although technically not a school as there were neither students nor teachers. Many Southern-related artists, including Charleston native Louis Rémy Mignot and William Frerichs (who taught in Greensboro) had also embraced the aesthetic, which emphasized bodies of water, rolling countrysides, and billowing cloudscapes. Upon discovering the later Hudson River painters known as the Luminists, Beerman found great kinship in their handling of light and their sense of timelessness.

Eventually, Beerman’s roots beckoned, and he returned to North Carolina around 2013, settling in Hillsborough, an historic town northwest of Durham. He is a methodical and studious artist, completing series of drawings en plein air—often revisiting the same site at the same time of day much in the manner of Claude Monet. Of late, Beerman has included structures, often shown only partially, in his landscapes. In a recent interview he indicated he was proud to be called a North Carolina artist, and recalled a marketing campaign from the 1930s that claimed the state as “variety vacationland.”

Source: The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina
thejohnsoncollection.org

The following text was submitted in June of 2006 by Jeanne Chisholm:

John Beerman is a master of painting the American countryside. As a student of the school of the great Hudson River landscape painters, light is the presiding presence in his work. Peaceful, almost dreamlike scenes float off the medium surface. He delivers visual and emotional findings to the viewer, characterized by the full power of nature and devoid of human intervention.