Don Hershman: Out of Line — Don Hershman

The Award-Winning San Francisco-based artist brings four bodies of work together in a New York solo exhibition tracing the evolution of line as structure, emotion and identity

Artist Don Hershman will present = OUT OF LINE =, a solo exhibition opening Thursday, October 1st, 2026 and runs through Tuesday, October 20th, 2026, at One Art Space in Tribeca. Curated by MaryAnn Giella McCulloh from four distinct bodies of work, the exhibition brings together paintings from The Art of Code Switching (2023), I Am a Barn (2024), Urban Abstraction (2025), and Still/Still (2025) to reveal the evolution of a singular visual language centered on the line. Across barns, city surfaces, still life’s and portraiture, Hershman uses repeated and overlapping lines to build color, rhythm, atmosphere and emotional resonance.

Hershman’s path to = OUT OF LINE = begins with structure. In I Am a Barn (2024), the weathered planks, beams and architectural surfaces of rural barns offered a natural foundation for his developing visual vocabulary.

Those early paintings transformed agricultural buildings into meditations on resilience, shelter and memory, while establishing the repeated linear marks that would become central to his practice. From there, Urban Abstraction(2025) moved the language into the city, where cropped fragments of walls, garage doors, pavement and graffiti became studies in rhythm, tension and layered surface.

In Still/Still (2025), Hershman turned to everyday objects, using line and color to transform familiar forms into quieter, more meditative compositions. His most recent chapter, The Art of Code Switching (2023), brings that same language to portraiture, applying line to the human figure to explore identity, visibility and perception.

Taken together, = OUT OF LINE = is not just a retrospective, but rather a clear journey of artistic continuity: the story of an artist who has refined one formal element into a broad and expressive language capable of carrying architecture, memory, environment and human experience.

Don Hershman is a San Francisco-based artist whose distinctive practice draws upon a parallel career as an accomplished podiatric surgeon, bringing precision, structure and an intuitive understanding of form to his work. Born and educated in New York, Hershman developed an early passion for art through visits to the city’s museums before pursuing medicine. He continued drawing throughout his medical training and surgical career, eventually devoting himself more fully to painting in the early 1990s. Working from photographs and initial drawings, he builds compositions through layers of line and color, moving between representation and abstraction while exploring memory, perception, identity and the architecture of everyday life.

Since his first San Francisco exhibition in 1992, Hershman’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in private collections in the United States and abroad. His paintings were jury selected for the de Young Open in San Francisco in 2020 and 2023, and he received top recognition in the 2022 MvVO ART/AD ART SHOW in New York. Solo exhibitions have included Donald and Victor: Under the Influence as well as exhibitions in San Francisco, Provincetown and elsewhere. His I AM A BARN series, exploring resilience through weathered architectural forms, was featured on the cover of San Francisco Arts Monthly in 2024.

One Art Space opened in May 2011 and for more than 16 years has been a cultural destination in the heart of Tribeca, presenting museum‑caliber exhibitions by established and emerging artists from New York and internationally. Led by co‑owners and women gallerists MaryAnn Giella McCulloh and Mei Fung, the gallery blends art and curatorial skill with business expertise. Located at 23 Warren Street in New York City, the gallery occupies a versatile ground‑level space with a glass façade, providing a perfect backdrop for both the artwork and the artist to shine.

MaryAnn’s background in creativity stems from her father, Joe Giella, a renowned Batman illustrator hired by Stan Lee, whose artwork was featured on two USPS stamps issued in 2006 as part of the DC Comics Superheroes release (The Green Lantern and The Flash).

For more than a decade, One Art Space has championed women artists through its annual Women’s History Month exhibitions. MaryAnn Giella McCulloh also serves on the NAWA (National Association of Women Artists) Executive Board of Directors. NAWA is one of the nation’s longstanding organizations dedicated to supporting and advancing women artists.

Our mission is to create a place where the giants of art history and the visionaries of art’s future come together in One Art Space.