Sharon Barnes

BIO

Born November 1949 in Sacramento, CA, Sharon Barnes (Sharon Louise Barnes) is a Los Angeles-based visual artist who is known for her mixed media paintings, sculptural assemblages, and installations. Her work has evolved over decades into an exploration of Social Abstraction, energized by a relentless experimentation with materials, processes, and form. Creating her self-described “thick skinned” paintings often involves merging hundreds of fragments of materials such as sweet tea-stained paper, crushed black eyed peas, and burlap along with acrylics, inks, and other media.

Barnes has exhibited nationally and internationally. 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); Patacones, Paintbrushes & Power at the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (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 during 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 Medical Center (Watts, CA); 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.