Andrew Herzog is an American interdisciplinary artist and designer.
He’s a partner and director at School, a small, full-service creative studio bringing thoughtful perspectives to conceptual, practical, and visual problems. He was previously a co-founder and partner at the design and technology studio HAWRAF0 and is an alumnus of Google Creative Lab0.
His international art practice realizes projects in public space that manifest as installations and interventions–often collaborative and/or interactive in nature. In 2018, Herzog completed Circle Or Curve?, a painted a meter-wide, one-kilometer in diameter circle around the National Museum of Art of Romania commissioned by the EIDOS Foundation0 for their UNFINISHED FESTIVAL in Bucharest. In 2019, The Franklin Institute0 of Philadelphia commissioned his interactive public installation, Blue Sky Or Sky Blue? which was shown at The Franklin Institute as well as for an extended period of time at Penn’s Landing Park in Philadelphia. Also in 2019, Herzog completed two of his A Communal Line participatory public installations. One took place at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia and the other took place earlier in the year at the invitation of the A4 Museum0 in Chengdu, China. In 2021 Herzog published, A Report: Circle Or Curve? his first in a series of books overviewing each of his public art installations. In 2022, commissioned by vaga - espaço de arte e conhecimento0, he created a film work based on his participatory installation projects – A Communal Line on São Miguel Island in the Azores, Portugal. Also in 2022, he installed his first permanent installation work, HERE/ICI, commissioned by the SCAD Museum of Art0 set to be installed in Lacoste, France.
He maintains a studio art practice in New York City where he works medium agnostically realizing artworks in-house that offer viewers spaces to interface0 with Art, each other, and our world amid the Anthropocene0. The studio also serves as a space for developing his public and longer-term projects in addition to experimentation with new material and subject matter. Depending on the nature of the work, Herzog collaborates with engineers, fabricators, curators, filmmakers as well as a myriad of other practitioners to realize his projects.
His former design studio HAWRAF was started in NEW INC.0, the New Museum's incubator program. HAWRAF was known for creating honest and interesting interactive work for its clients and self-initiated projects and received much attention for its transparent operations and antics. When the studio closed its doors in 2019 they released all of their internal documents to the public in an effort to open a door and lower the barrier of entry to running a creative business. Prior to HAWRAF, at the Google Creative Lab, he worked on projects dealing with Artificial Intelligence, creative tools, and accessibility. Most notably he work on the project Quick, Draw! which created the world’s largest drawing data set0, shared publicly to help with machine learning research. Quick, Draw! paved the way for AutoDraw which Herzog lead the creation of. AutoDraw was a free digital design tool that utilized machine learning and the Quick, Draw! dataset to auto-complete users' drawings. Before all of that, he worked stretches at Sagmeister & Walsh0 and R/GA0.
His work has been featured at the Cannes International Festival for Creativity0, Art Directors Club0, and D&AD0. In 2017 he was added to PRINT Magazine’s annual list of “New Visual Artists: 15 under 30” list. In 2020 he was nominated for the C/O Berlin Talent Award0 where he presented the work Surkov's Rock #1-8. His work has been featured in countless publications including Fast Company, The Verge, Hypebeast, Quartz, Creators Project (VICE), It’s Nice That, Mashable, and The Atlantic.
He has been an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts0 in New York City since 2016 and Parsons School of Design | The New School0 since 2022. He continues to lecture at universities and conferences internationally about his art and design practice. He received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Savannah College of Art and Design.
The idea of personal archives seems increasingly necessary and useful. It provides context for anyone interested in the build-up of work over time. An archive provides a level of transparency that has proven recurrent in Herzog's work and process in both art and design. At its best, the archive is a make-shift syllabus for aspiring artists and designers. At its worst, it's an annoyance to keep up to date. Either way, it is in itself a project, one that documents the output of Andrew Herzog throughout his creative pursuits.