Sharon Barnes

Sharon Louise Barnes is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist who creates mixed media paintings, sculptural assemblages, and installations. Ms. Barnes is interested in the potential of objects to speak about the human condition. Her works create metaphors of fracture and reparation, displacement and reposition, layer and overlap, informed by the Black experience and critical discourse. As an artist she is known for its exploration of Social Abstraction and a continual experimentation with mediums, materials, and processes. As she has explained:

“I’m interested in sites of resistance, resilience, and beauty while I explore the possibilities for abstraction to serve both expressive and narrative intentions. Activating Social Abstraction and the poetics of materiality, I’m creating layered surfaces and assembled forms that fuse a wide array of found and traditional materials, constructing visual metaphors about displacement, healing, memorialization, and rebuilding.  I’m going for a certain jazzification of the formal, a claiming of space, a making of mark, a make-shift elevation of whatever is at hand, signifying Black diasporas as I strip away, pile on, weave into, and reimagine the physical and spiritual embodiment of each piece. Hanging threads, repeating ideographic shapes, visual elements of chaos, and moments of sparkle are part of my continually evolving lexicon.”

Born in Sacramento, CA and raised in Los Angeles, Ms. Barnes is a descendant of historic black pioneers who came to northern California in the mid-1800’s after California entered the union as a free state.  Her family’s histories are documented in books and archives including Negro Trailblazers of California, Black Life in the Sacramento Valley 1850-1934, the UCLA and Stanford University Photo Archives, and the book Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro. Her work is informed by years of genealogical research to excavate her familial histories.

Sharon Barnes earned her MFA in Fine Arts from Otis College of Art & Design and a B.A. in Television-Film from CSULA. Barnes has been awarded fellowships and residencies that include the MacDowell Fellowship and Residency, the City of Los Angeles C.O.L.A. Master Artist Individual Fellowship, the Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency, and the Spelman College Summer Art Colony at Taller Portobelo, Panama. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Crocker Art Museum, the California African American Museum, the UCLA Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies, the City of Inglewood, and the J. Paul Getty Research Institute Photo Archive. She has exhibited in galleries, colleges, universities, and museums including the California African American Museum, the Ontario Museum of Art & History, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Inglewood City Hall, the Watts Towers Arts Center, UCLA, and California Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Visit the artist’s website: https://sharonlouisebarnes.com/