E Sherman Hayman

E. Sherman Hayman creates densely layered works that examine how freedom is distributed, restricted, and defended within American society. Working primarily through sgraffito and mixed media on museum board, she combines vivid color, incised texture, historical research, quotations, and symbolic details. The visual richness draws viewers inward, where the work reveals more difficult questions about violence, identity, death, political power, and collective responsibility.

Hayman develops her work in series, often constructing smaller sequences within larger bodies of work. For the past several decades, these projects have consistently addressed social issues. Each begins with a subject she finds impossible to dismiss and develops through sustained research, material experimentation, and critical reflection.

Her process is closely aligned with a loose translation she recalls from French writer Romain Gary: when confronted by something she cannot change or resolve, she transfers it into creative work. Once the subject has been given form, it becomes less oppressive.

Art, in this sense, does not necessarily solve the problem under examination. It gives Hayman a structure through which to confront it, analyze it, and release some of its psychological pressure.

In the 1990s, gun violence became one of her central concerns. Hayman repeatedly encountered brief newspaper reports about people killed over minor objects or momentary disputes, including the theft of a pair of sunglasses. The apparent disproportion between the cause and the loss of life led her to question who in the United States possesses the freedom to move through public space without becoming a victim of gun violence.

The series developed around a conflict between competing definitions of liberty. Does one person’s asserted right to carry a firearm compromise another person’s right to walk safely through the street? Hayman does not treat freedom as an abstract ideal. She asks how it functions when one individual’s exercise of power creates fear or danger for someone else.

Profiling and identity became the focus of The MARK Portraits. The project began after Hayman’s Mediterranean-looking husband was stopped at an airport without an apparent reason. The incident prompted her to examine how identity is assigned through appearance and how freedom can depend upon what others believe a person represents.

The portraits ask whether individual rights are determined by who someone is or by how that person is perceived. The distinction is central to Hayman’s practice. Political systems may describe freedom as universal, while their daily enforcement remains shaped by race, visibility, suspicion, and institutional authority.

Hayman later turned toward death in The Final Frontier. The series examined the history of mourning, cultural fears surrounding mortality, the language used to discuss death, funerary architecture, death customs, and methods of execution. As part of the project, she carved thirty small decorative caskets commemorating artists and figures she describes as scalawags.

The miniature coffins combine ornament with mortality. Their scale invites close attention, while their commemorative function complicates the distance between historical figure, personal judgment, and physical death. As elsewhere in Hayman’s work, an attractive surface becomes an entry point into a less comfortable subject.

Her political series Wheel, Deal, Steal, Then Spin approached contemporary dysfunction through American history. Extensive reading led Hayman to question the difference between what the country claims to represent and what its institutions have done. Individual works addressed early child labor law, relationships between government and corporations, and government-sponsored medical experimentation involving incarcerated and mentally ill people.

The project altered how Hayman understood freedom itself. She concluded that the amount of personal freedom available to an individual is often determined less by citizenship than by power, money, and race. National ideals remain important, but the historical record demonstrates how unevenly those ideals have been applied.

This relationship between principle and practice gives the work its urgency. Hayman is not interested in abandoning the language of American freedom. She wants viewers to recognize where the country has failed to honor it and consider what would be required to make it more than a selective promise.

Sgraffito supports this layered investigation materially. Hayman builds surfaces with wax and oil crayon, then scratches through them using various tools. The process exposes underlying colors and creates dense physical textures. Each mark reveals what had been covered, making excavation part of the image’s structure.

Mixed media extends this visual vocabulary, while museum board provides a stable surface for detailed construction. Hayman’s use of text is equally important. A former English major, she incorporates witty adages, philosophical commentary, poetry, and historical quotations. Language does not merely explain the image. It introduces additional tones and arguments that may confirm, disrupt, or complicate what the viewer initially sees.

Color and texture serve as a form of attraction. Hayman wants their intensity to bring people close enough to read the words and notice the smaller symbols embedded throughout the composition. Some quotations are amusing, while others are disturbing. The contrast prevents political content from becoming visually predictable.

The viewer must move between pleasure and discomfort. A seductive surface may contain evidence of violence or injustice, while humor can coexist with historical condemnation. These contradictions reflect the social structures Hayman examines, where appealing national narratives often conceal less defensible realities.

For Hayman, genuine freedom requires education that includes the failures, deceptions, and contradictions of American history. People cannot meaningfully defend democratic ideals if they understand those ideals only through a simplified national story.

Education must also cultivate skepticism. Hayman believes children should learn to listen to others, respect difference, and question ideas that do not seem ethically sound. She is less optimistic about changing adults whose positions have already hardened, making early intellectual and moral development especially important.

Awareness, in her account, must be joined by empathy and introspection. She returns to the four freedoms articulated by Franklin D. Roosevelt: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These principles provide a framework, but they require citizens willing to defend the rights of people outside their own immediate group.

“Stand up for what you know in your heart to be right,” Hayman argues, invoking the protest declaration, “Silence is violence.”

Her understanding of freedom also comes from direct experience. Many years ago, while returning to France from Amsterdam, Hayman was arrested at the Belgian-French border after forgetting that a small amount of an illegal substance remained in her handbag. She spent three weeks in prison before being released.

Until then, freedom had existed largely as an assumed condition. Its meaning became immediate only when it disappeared. Hayman describes the experience as deeply instructive, revealing aspects of herself she might never otherwise have encountered. Despite the circumstances, she remains grateful for what it taught her.

The episode reinforced a principle present throughout her work: freedom is easiest to overlook when it appears secure. Its structures become visible when they fail, when they are withdrawn, or when one recognizes that another person has never possessed the same protections.

Hayman identifies tribalism as one of the greatest contemporary threats to freedom. Political and social groups increasingly define themselves through opposition, treating the rights of others as negotiable. Without empathy, she sees little possibility of meaningful change.

Periods of national crisis have sometimes produced solidarity, with political leaders calling people toward shared responsibility. Yet the current wall of polarization undermines that collective capacity. If the rights of “the other” remain open to debate, Hayman asks, how can freedom exist securely for anyone?

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stands foremost among the figures she associates with the struggle for freedom. Hayman also emphasizes parents, particularly mothers, who have lost children to gun violence and transformed grief into public action. Their campaigns for legislation, improved policing, and stronger community support embody a form of courage grounded in personal loss.

These parents connect Hayman’s recent political concerns to the gun violence that occupied her work decades earlier. The subject has not disappeared, and neither has the underlying question of whose safety is treated as a protected right.

Across Hayman’s series, historical research and material construction serve the same objective: to make systems of power available for close examination. Her work does not separate individual experience from political history. Profiling, imprisonment, violence, mourning, and institutional abuse all reveal how public structures enter private life.

Freedom, in Hayman’s practice, is never merely a possession. It is a social condition that depends upon education, accountability, empathy, and the willingness to protect rights beyond one’s own. Her images ask viewers to move closer, read carefully, and consider what may be concealed beneath the language of liberty.