Bahamian Artist Profile: Heino Schmid
Visual Artist

Heino Schmid

“The context of much of my work is concerned with narrative and the reconsideration of personal stories in the public forum. Using a variety of media such as video, drawing, installation and photography, I investigate the often simple, sometimes irrelevant encounters and collisions between people and their environments.

“Although I strive for universal metaphors, I approach each body of work in a very personal way. Using self-referential experiences as an avenue to illuminating collective experiences, I hope to reveal the subtle social dramas that inform social dynamics and ultimately bring those realities to the forefront for discussion.”

– Heino Schmid

The video and photographic documentation of Bahamian-born artist Heino Schmid is derived from the artist’s own experiences and immediate environment. By incorporating and recontextualizing found materials, Schmid is able to question the inherent conflicts of social and personal boundaries and how divisions are created by these conflicts. Often, the artist uses elements of performance, which allows the work to contain a distinct narrative. Elements of nature are also used as objects of observation and as environments to contain other works.

Heino Schmid was born in 1976 in Nassau but spent from ages two to eight living in Germany, from where his father hails. Schmid turned to art after completing a finance degree at the College of The Bahamas (COB).

Schmid worked for two days at a bank before realising that this was not the life for him. “It just wasn’t right,” he says. “So I did the most opposite thing that I could think of and signed up for an art class with [noted Bahamian artist Antonius] Roberts at COB. I guess that’s how I make a lot of decisions. If something isn’t working I just try the opposite…”

Schmid recalls that he would always doodle in his accounting books and notebooks and when Roberts asked to see his portfolio, that’s what he had to offer.

“He was not very impressed and I was only allowed to take a summer class, which was fine,” says Schmid with a laugh.

After COB, he enrolled in the Savannah School of Art and Design [SCAD], where he completed a BFA Degree in Photography.

After SCAD he worked at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas for over a year before receiving the Harry Moore Memorial Scholarship in the Arts from the Lyford Cay Foundation in 2005. With this scholarship, Schmid went on to complete his Masters in Fine Arts at the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design in the Netherlands.

Schmid has held and participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world including The Bahamas, Trinidad, UK, The Netherlands, Germany, and the United States. He has also been a recipient of a number of prestigious awards including The Commonwealth Connections International Residency Award in 2009, The Endowment for The Arts Award for Graduate Studies in 2005, The Lyford Cay Foundation Scholarship and The June White Portfolio Scholarship, both in 2000-03.

In addition to his own practice, he is Lecturer Professor for the School of Communication and Creative Arts at the College of the Bahamas; curator of the Central Bank of the Bahamas Art Gallery; and Co-exhibitions Director of Popopstudios Centre for the Visual Arts, a non-profit artists’ co-op where he also holds a studio.

Source: Smith & Benjamin’s Bahamian Arts & Culture
No. 60 : 11.10.11