A.D. HERZEL: LOTUS ROOTS
/A.D. HERZEL: LOTUS ROOTS
February 25 – April 12, 2025
Buchanan Partners Gallery
inside Hylton Performing Arts Center
During the past 60 years, over 200,000 adopted Korean children were brought to the US and raised in predominantly white families. In a community Art Project titled, Seeds From The East: The Korean Adoptee Portrait Project, A.D. Herzel worked with 12 fellow Korean immigrants from the US and Norway to bear witness to their stories. In an act of cultural reclamation, A.D. created this project to navigate the loss of her Korean culture, ancestry, and language.
In this exhibition Herzel presents a selection of works from her series Mirror Silhouettes. Inspired by the lives of these adopted children; now adults, who shared their stories with her. It is a testament to their struggle and survival. The floral motifs in each portrait stemmed from the question, “What was your adoptive mother’s favorite flower?” Some did not know how to answer as they were estranged from their adoptive mothers. In those cases, the image began with their own favorite flowers. The flower is a symbol of reproductive desire. Parental desire, rooted in the loss of one family, does not guarantee filial piety. The images are spontaneous organic meditations inspired by the life stories shared with Herzel, intimating her subjects’ evolving search for identity.
About the Artist:
A.D. Herzel is a Korean American Adoptee Artist who has exhibited work for the past twenty years. Her drawings have been exhibited Nationally. She trained as a painter and printmaker at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and went on to receive her M.Ed. in Art Education at the Tyler School of Art in 2000. She was awarded the 2023 Works on Paper Fellowship from The Virginia Commission for the Arts and won the Director’s Choice Award for her piece, Grails in the Made in VA 2022 show at VAMOCA. Her digital work has been published in the Manifest International Drawing Annual, INDA 8 and she has won several awards of recognition for her drawings. Her work has been recognized by curators from the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, The Kimbell Museum of Fine Arts in Texas and The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She has been represented by galleries in Fort Worth, TX, Nashville, TN and Philadelphia, PA. Her most recent project, Seeds From The East: The Korean Adoptee Portrait Project was shown at The Philip Jaisohn House in Pennsylvania, and at the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum in Roanoke, VA.