Sharon Barnes

BIO

Sharon Barnes is a Los Angeles-based visual artist who creates mixed media paintings, sculptural assemblages, and installations while working at the intersections of abstraction and socio-cultural reflection. Interested in process, materials, and the evocative possibilities of visual language, her self-described “thick-skinned paintings” merge a wide array of media and materials ranging from painted canvas, sweet tea stained papers and carbon paper to black eyed peas. Experimentation and risk taking are vital to her studio practice. Barnes explains, “In my early days of making art, I was working with representational figuration. But later, I challenged myself to explore abstraction because I saw it as an alternative form of “representation” that helped me point to the nonlinear complexities and emotional interiority of one’s personal and collective identity. I find that abstraction invites deeper looking and contemplation, both on my part as well as that of the viewer.”

Barnes has exhibited nationally and internationally over the course of her career. Her large-scale painting, Music is What We Make in Music’s Absence is currently installed in the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia as part of the Art In Embassies Program. Exhibitions and projects include her 40-foot wide painting and sculptural installation, Replotted Paths & Replanted Gardens displayed in the Tom Bradley International Terminal of the Los Angeles Airport (LAX); and her recent solo show, Improvisations of a Polyrhythmic Being at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Notable group exhibitions include Innervisions at the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum (2025); Risky Business: A Painter’s Forum at the Torrance Art Museum (2024); an acquisitions exhibit at the Crocker Art Museum (2022); Adornment /Artifact, supported by The Getty and curated by jill moniz (2022); and exhibitions at the California African American Museum that include, Hard Edged: Geometrical Abstraction (2015), as well as the important Survey Exhibition of African American Artists in Los Angeles, Pathways 1966-89 curated by Dale Brockman Davis (2005), and Altares, a four woman installation with Torkwase Dyson, Imna Arroyo, and Tosha Grantham at the historic Arco Chato for the 2000 Panama Biennial.

Her work is held in the permanent collections of the California African American Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the UCLA Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies, the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, the City of Inglewood, Kaiser Permanente, the Los Angeles Urban League, and others. She is a recipient of the MacDowell Fellowship, NH; the City of Los Angeles Individual Master Artist Fellowship (COLA); the Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency, MI; and the Spelman College Summer Art Colony/Taller Portobelo, Panama.

She earned her MFA at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles and had previously been an undergraduate student of renown artist and historian, Samella Lewis. A lifelong creative, Barnes is also a former songwriter and lyricist credited on numerous recordings featuring major artists.

Sharon Barnes is of African American and Cape Verdean ancestry. A fifth generation Californian born in Sacramento, CA, she lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.