Erin Hoffman is a full-time art instructor at Muskegon Community College. She teaches printmaking, art appreciation, drawing, painting, and contemporary art history. Hoffman’s prints combine historical and politically themed imagery to examine aspects of contemporary American society. Many of her prints begin with a collage of memories, triggered by scents, images, or other stimuli that cross her path.
“If you think about the way that we understand memories, they are in pieces,” says Hoffman. “So, if you think about if you are walking through a room and suddenly something that might be like your grandmother’s perfume or some kind of food, you’re triggered towards a memory of that, if it’s isolated. It’s an individual item. It might be visual; it might be color; it might be some other kind of sensation, but it’s individual—and I’m interested in what happens when you pair it with something else.”
To achieve that pairing, Hoffman might use leftover parts of prints she has made before and use them to create collages. These might be the wood blocks used for printing or something else. Hoffman says that she has collected boxes of these blocks, and she may play with different color schemes or cut them up and piece them back together again in a different design.
Some of the topics represented in these new pieces make statements about Hoffman’s perspective on the world.
“I don’t think of myself as an activist,” she says. “I think of myself as an artist who’s responding to contemporary times. I think of contemporary times in the context of history. Again, I’m taking isolated and individual images and sticking them into some other context to think about the relationship between them but also how we got here.”
Hoffman’s work is currently on exhibit as part of the Ninth Annual Group Exhibition at Ninth Wave Studio in Kalamazoo through January 19, 2024. She will return to Ninth Wave Studio in March for a duo exhibition with printmaker Lee Ann Frame.
Hoffman received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2001 from the University of Northern Iowa and her Master of Fine Arts degree in 2005 at the University of Georgia. Both degrees are in printmaking.
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