Pinkney Herbert was born in Charlotte, NC in 1954. He received his BA from Rhodes College and his MFA from the University of Memphis. Herbert is the recipient of Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and USIA-Arts America. He has participated in numerous art exhibitions throughout the US, Europe, Japan, and Southeast Asia. His art is in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Memphis Brooks Museum, the Arkansas Arts Center, among others. Herbert is represented by David Lusk Gallery, Memphis, TN; Fox Gallery, New York, NY; Boyd|Satellite, New Orleans, LA; Greg Thompson Fine Arts, North Little Rock, AR. He is a fellow and board member of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Amherst, VA, and VCCA-France, Auvillar, France. Herbert is the founder and director of Marshall Arts, an alternative gallery and studio space established in 1992 in Memphis, TN. He maintains studios in Memphis and New York.

In November 2015, the Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture at University of Tennessee presented a 30 year survey of Herbert’s work entitled Distilled: The Narrative Transformed. In 2013-2014, Herbert was awarded a year-long studio as part of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program, Brooklyn, NY. He has taught painting and drawing at the University of Georgia Study Abroad Program in Cortona, Italy, and also at the Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts, Penland School of Crafts, Arrowmont School, the University of Memphis, and the Memphis College of Art. He has been a visiting artist at the University of Tennessee, the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, Hanoi University of Fine Arts, and the Oberfalzer Kuntzlerhaus, Schwandorf, Germany.

These five 2020 works are influenced by COVID-19.

I am influenced by my immediate surroundings. Since 2008, I have split my time mostly between Memphis and New York. Working in both cities has inspired a sense of exploration and a certain amount of nervous anxiety in my paintings and drawings ­­ allowing for the funky raw history of Memphis to collide with the energy of New York City. This dichotomy fires my intuitive impulses, allowing them to surface and meet head­ on with the ever­ changing conflict between the emotional and the cerebral. The gestural marks I make attempt to bridge that gap. The resulting imagery is influenced by many sources, including art history, the figure, architecture, maps, signals, water, music, urban imagery, and digital technology. Especially during the last few years, I have used an abstract language to question the connections between my inner world and the real world.