Holding Space
Kathleen Sherin & Catherine Shuman MillerNov 14 6:00pm — Jan 10, 2026 2:00pm
We are pleased to invite you to Holding Space, an exhibition of unique print-based works on paper by Kathleen Sherin and Catherine Shuman Miller at Hunt Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. The opening reception will be held on Friday, November 14, from 6 PM to 9 PM. This selection of singular, unrepeatable surfaces, presents a continuity of works that explore each artist’s use of print-making as a medium to inspire meditation, reflection, and connection, holding space that encourages one’s full presence, mentally and physically.
These two non-traditional printmakers first met in the mid-1980s as graduate students. For many summers, Kathleen and Catherine (Kathy and Cathy, as we like to say) worked side by side in the printshop at University at Buffalo through the community access program. This shared environment fostered both a friendship and a rich exchange of ideas and techniques, allowing them to witness each other’s deeply personal development as artists.
Kathleen Sherin begins each series as an open-ended inquiry that evolves through intuitive gesture and direct, non-chemical printmaking processes such as monoprint, collagraph, drypoint, chine collé, and carborundum. Through these tactile methods, visual and psychological polarities emerge organically. The energy of her gestural linework amidst soothing blue squares presents simple contrasts–calm and chaos, stability and disruption–that distill complex truths into quiet clarity. She navigates the delicate threshold between intuition and reason, drawing from internal bodily systems and emotions, as well as external environmental and global forces, which blur boundaries, real or imagined. Her saturated gradients of blue and black seek to hold the moment between light and darkness, to capture the lingering resonance that shimmers through the trees as night descends, and to mirror the fragile balance of awareness that grounds us in the face of shifting forces.
Catherine Shuman Miller is a printmaker and painter whose work explores the search for place, belonging, and the ways we attune to the environments we inhabit and traverse. Through layered processes using silk collagraphs, carborundum plates, transparent inks, and the quiet logic of the grid, she creates fields of rhythm in colorful palettes shaped by local light. Shapes of mountains, architecture structures, natural and man-made systems become intuitively absorbed and reimagined into meditations on navigation, memory, and home. Her Sentinels, inspired by the monumentality of totem poles and the protective presence of the Jewish mezuzah, bridges cultural and spiritual traditions, exploring how symbols of home and belonging can serve as guardians of identity. Cathy Shuman Miller’s work reveals a quiet dialogue between structure and freedom, emotion and order, creating meditative compositions that transform personal and collective experience into spaces of refuge and renewal.
While distinct in style and technique, Kathy and Cathy share a commitment to the creation of compositions that conceptualize and both dichotomously reflect personal and societal journeys. Their layered impressions navigate the intersections of interior and exterior worlds and the coexistence of conflicting and resolving rhythms. Together, their work transforms the gallery into a contemplative space, part sanctuary and part passageway, inviting viewers to consider how we construct and preserve our sense of home, safety, and self, and explore an ongoing dialog between meaning and potential. Together, Sherin and Shuman Miller remind us that to hold space for oneself, for others, and for the world is an act of creation, care, and resilience.
We are pleased to invite you to Holding Space, an exhibition of unique print-based works on paper by Kathleen Sherin and Catherine Shuman Miller at Hunt Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. The opening reception will be held on Friday, November 14, from 6 PM to 9 PM. This selection of singular, unrepeatable surfaces, presents a continuity of works that explore each artist’s use of print-making as a medium to inspire meditation, reflection, and connection, holding space that encourages one’s full presence, mentally and physically.
These two non-traditional printmakers first met in the mid-1980s as graduate students. For many summers, Kathleen and Catherine (Kathy and Cathy, as we like to say) worked side by side in the printshop at University at Buffalo through the community access program. This shared environment fostered both a friendship and a rich exchange of ideas and techniques, allowing them to witness each other’s deeply personal development as artists.
Kathleen Sherin begins each series as an open-ended inquiry that evolves through intuitive gesture and direct, non-chemical printmaking processes such as monoprint, collagraph, drypoint, chine collé, and carborundum. Through these tactile methods, visual and psychological polarities emerge organically. The energy of her gestural linework amidst soothing blue squares presents simple contrasts–calm and chaos, stability and disruption–that distill complex truths into quiet clarity. She navigates the delicate threshold between intuition and reason, drawing from internal bodily systems and emotions, as well as external environmental and global forces, which blur boundaries, real or imagined. Her saturated gradients of blue and black seek to hold the moment between light and darkness, to capture the lingering resonance that shimmers through the trees as night descends, and to mirror the fragile balance of awareness that grounds us in the face of shifting forces.
Catherine Shuman Miller is a printmaker and painter whose work explores the search for place, belonging, and the ways we attune to the environments we inhabit and traverse. Through layered processes using silk collagraphs, carborundum plates, transparent inks, and the quiet logic of the grid, she creates fields of rhythm in colorful palettes shaped by local light. Shapes of mountains, architecture structures, natural and man-made systems become intuitively absorbed and reimagined into meditations on navigation, memory, and home. Her Sentinels, inspired by the monumentality of totem poles and the protective presence of the Jewish mezuzah, bridges cultural and spiritual traditions, exploring how symbols of home and belonging can serve as guardians of identity. Cathy Shuman Miller’s work reveals a quiet dialogue between structure and freedom, emotion and order, creating meditative compositions that transform personal and collective experience into spaces of refuge and renewal.
While distinct in style and technique, Kathy and Cathy share a commitment to the creation of compositions that conceptualize and both dichotomously reflect personal and societal journeys. Their layered impressions navigate the intersections of interior and exterior worlds and the coexistence of conflicting and resolving rhythms. Together, their work transforms the gallery into a contemplative space, part sanctuary and part passageway, inviting viewers to consider how we construct and preserve our sense of home, safety, and self, and explore an ongoing dialog between meaning and potential. Together, Sherin and Shuman Miller remind us that to hold space for oneself, for others, and for the world is an act of creation, care, and resilience.