Daniel Heyman is an artist whose work in drawing, printmaking and painting directs the viewer's attention to contemporary social and political issues. Deeply interested in narrative, he uses images to tell stories that combine a love of history and myth in an effort to provoke discussion and empathy. In his recent Summons series, Heyman emphatically returns to images without words. His previous effort, the monumental woodcut Janus from 2019-2020, represents time as an endless string of birth, renewal and death for creatures and ideas. Here, even the very human act of making culture is seen as both creative and destructive, signaling the profound influence Japanese art and culture has had on his work. Presented as a three-part, traditionally mounted Japanese scroll, Janus was completed in 2019 in Philadelphia with Master Printer Cindi Ettinger and mounted by Japanese Master Craftsman Fujiwara Shigeki. In 2017 and 2018, Heyman was invited to the Awagami Factory, Yoshinogawa, Japan, where he created seven folding screens of handmade pulp-painted paper. He has also worked at the Udatsu Paper & Craft Museum in Echizen, Japan.
In 2015, Heyman was invited by Professors Kim Fink and Lucy Ganje from the University of North Dakota to collaborate on In Our Own Words: Native Impressions 2015-2016an outstanding project of 26 prints that chronicles autobiographical stories with portraiture of individual Native Americans who live in the tribal Nations of North Dakota. This work has been exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the North Dakota Museum of Art.Other projects include Heyman's Iraqi Portraits giving voice to former detainees of Abu Ghraib prison entitled The Amman Portfolio 2006 and The Istanbul Portfolio 2006. Between 2006 and 2008, Heyman traveled to Jordan and Turkey with American lawyer Susan Burke to witness the testimony of former prisoners held and tortured at Abu Ghraib that were later released without charges. While lawyers collected statements for civil lawsuits, Heyman sketched the likenesses of the detainees and surrounded their faces with their own testimony. When Photographers are Blinded, Eagles Wings are Clipped2010,a monumental 65-part etching printed on wood and paper, has been included in numerous exhibitions including In Residence: Contemporary Artists at Dartmouth at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (2014); Heyman's solo exhibition I am Sorry It is Difficult to Start at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University (2013); and Here and Now curated by Innis Howe Shoemaker at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2011).