The Herkimer Suite

The Herkimer Suite makes reference to botanical elements native to the Brooklyn street mentioned in the title where Suárez Londoño stayed while working on this series. It evokes herbaria and the ways such archives were used to organize and present information and, by extension, knowledge. The first print, designated as a "test plate herbarium," introduces motifs—such as the tightly wound concentric circles, samples of botanical elements, images of beads and jewelry, animals, and people— that appear in the other prints, along with information about the suite and the manner in which it was produced. The artist rotated the plate as he worked so that animals, people, and plants seems to float across the surface without a consistent orientation. Necklaces and jewelry, found in each print, are a reference to the jeweler that had occupied the space of the Harlan & Weaver before it was a print studio, something Suárez Londoño notes in the sixth and last print. The series evokes the artist’s celebrated "yearbooks," visual journals begun in the early 1990s in which he creates daily drawings inspired by, or as a reaction to, books he is reading and objects he encounters in his environment and studio, such as photographs, plants, scraps of paper. In these yearbooks, the artist combines figurative drawings and abstract, even decorative, elements, with small notations about the date, time, and location to note when each entry was created, along with musings, records of daily activities and perhaps quotations in various languages that relate to either the location where he is working or the source book he is reading.