Herman Cherry was born on April 10, 1909, in Atlantic City NJ, to immigrant parents from Russia and Minsk Gurbenia (now Lithuania), who had left behind pogroms and impending draft into the Sino-Russian war. The father, Israel Cherkovski, a women’s tailor, also had led a dancing school in Kiev; the mother, Ruth Rothkowich, a miller’s daughter, had arrived alone at the US shores in 1905. 

They settled in Philadelphia where Hyman, the middle child, was exposed to a neighbor’s son’s artistic output, and later to the creative environment at the Fleischer School. The shy young boy was beckoned by a kindly lady up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum where the painting by Benjamin West of 1796, Death on the Pale Horse greeted visitors, that painting had an overwhelming, lasting effect on his artistic pursuit. In 1923, the family moved to Los Angeles, where hardship followed. Selling newspapers in the early mornings he would fall asleep in high school, not finish it but educate himself at the library. Herman was hit by a car, the driver’s small compensation paid for some art classes. Later he would enter Otis Art Institute, make life long artist friends and become a monitor there to pay the tuition. The father had left the family after a few years and returned to Philadelphia.

To get out of economic distress in 1929, he signed on as mate and sailed on a Norwegian freighter to Europe, but encountering discrimination and abuse he jumped ship in Stettin, now Szczecin, Poland, and made his way to Hamburg, Germany, with a bit of Yiddish, where he would frequent the Salvation Army and hang around at the harbor waiting for a ship to take him back home to America without papers or a passport. Finally, one captain took him back to Savannah Georgia, from where he made his way to Philadelphia and on to New York for a year’s stay, and ultimately back to Los Angeles.

Cherry, having become somewhat bi-coastal, took up studies at the Art Students League in L.A. with the influential teacher Stanton MacDonald Wright, and with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League in New York City. Benton would engage him in 1930/31, in the preparatory work for the famous mural America Today at the New School for Social Research. Both teachers were proponents of the Synchromist movement, encouraging Cherry’s discourse with color. 

In the early/mid Thirties, he drove taxis and worked at the Stanley Rose Bookstore where he convinced the owner to open a small gallery upstairs where he exhibited Fletcher Martin, Reuben Kadish, Philip Goldstein - brought to him by Lorser Feitelson - Helen Lundeberg, and many others. Life long friendships were forged. Creating paintings and prints while exhibiting locally, Cherry achieved a presence in the art scene where he met the artist Denny Winters, whom he married in 1939, on the way to Arizona while working together on a touring historical pageant which told the story of the Spanish Explorer Coronado’s entrance into America.

Not being able to enlist in the war effort due to physical evaluation, Cherry stayed behind and worked under the WPA on the west coast. In 1943, he designed sets for Duke Ellington’s integrated production of Jump for Joy, conducted private art classes in Hollywood, and traveled to Mexico to study the murals by Mexican painters. The Mexican artist and muralist Siquieros’ presence in Los Angeles had an important influence on the politically engaged artists who had founded an Artists Union.

After WWII ended in 1945, Cherry and Denny Winters moved to the east coast to Woodstock NY, where he reconnected with Philip, now Guston, Reuben Kadish, his old California pal Fletcher Martin, and the Megafans; he quickly got entrenched in a new artist community. Cherry, as everyone called him, chaired the First and Second National Art Conferences held in Woodstock in 1947/8, during which he was introduced to more artists, David Smith and Dorothy Dehner - who became life long fast friends, Jimmy Ernst, Raoul Hague, Reggie Pollock, and many others. 

By the mid Forties he had moved from figuration into a Cubist abstraction which was furthered by these encounters. In 1948, Denny Winters received a Guggenheim Fellowship which enabled them to go to Paris where they worked together, created lithographs, came in contact with artists of the first wave of American GIs who had gone to Paris shortly after the war. From Paris they traveled to Italy and Spain exploring art and culture, seeking out French and Italian painters and sculptors. Cherry would later lecture in his teaching engagements in the US on some of these artists, yet unknown to an American audience. In Paris he connected with Abbe Breuil, the then ‘gatekeeper’ of the Lascaux Caves which had only been discovered a couple of years before. Cherry and the film maker Alain Renais proposed to make a film about the Lascaux Caves but funding could not be secured. Experiencing these caves impacted him profoundly and informed his ‘black’ paintings from the early Fifties. 

On Cherry’s return to the US in early 1950, Philip Guston, already a member of The Club in New York City, introduced Cherry who quickly became a member and a fixture at the events. He had begun to exhibit in New York in 1947/8, and continued once he had moved to the city where he developed his non-objective abstraction. In the mid Fifties, now divorced, he traveled to Brazil and Peru transporting cars there and took in South American culture.

By the late Fifties he accepted residencies and teaching engagements  from America’s universities and colleges - all the way up to Canada - which were then interested in employing artists, even without degrees. With his friend and fellow artist, Kyle Morris, he started a slide business in New York documenting gallery exhibits, as well as museum shows when possible. This endeavor was soon bought out and transformed into ‘Sendak Slides’.

In 1962, Cherry took another trip to Europe, France and Greece this time. Shortly after the return to the US his gallery representation ended, Pop art and Minimalism were the new focus. His teaching career ended in 1974, due to age policies and mandated retirement. He gave up painting, immersed himself in, and wrote poetry; he quipped to people asking what he was doing instead of painting “writing poetry - I had to make living”. 

In 1975, stranded without a job, few funds, and being physically and emotionally fragile, two of his artist friends in Europe, Martin Engelman and Shinkichi Tajiri, invited him to come for a visit during which he dared to take another look at Germany, after enough years had passed since WWII, and seeing that Spain’s Franco was in his last throes, decided to travel to Spain via Paris where he connected with his old friend Charles Pollock. In Berlin he had met through those artist friends they had in common, a young painter, Regina Kremer, who in 1976, would become his wife. In the mid Seventies economic recession was challenging the USA. The government created the CETA program (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act), which in 1978, was applied in big cities also to the artist communities, that saved many an artist in financial straits. Once Cherry got the grant, this “second WPA” forced him back into the studio to create murals and other projects for several local communities. It also gave him an incentive to get back to his painting when re-examining older work which  had to be rescued from the basement after a flood. The CETA program ended in 1982. Cherry found renewed interest in monoprints since his experimental, hand-printed output of the early to mid-Seventies, and that took him to the Robert Blackburn Print Shop. Those monoprints created between 1982 and 1984 exceedingly influenced his paintings of the mid Eighties.

By 1984, some dealers showed interest in the work he had been producing since returning to the studio, and he began to exhibit regularly which in the late Eighties led to retrospectives at Baruch College, NYC, Ball State University Art Gallery, Muncie Indiana, and to exhibits of late work at the Staller Center for the Arts, at Stony Brook University, NY, as well as to exhibitions in galleries, up into the year of his death on April 10, 1992.