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, process, materials, and socio-cultural content.

Interested in the evocative possibilities of abstract visual language, Barnes explores culture, identity, and ancestral memory. Additionally interested in embodiment and liminal space, her self-described “thick-skinned paintings” are multi-layered works that merge acrylics, oils, inks, and a profusion of fragments that range widely from sweet tea stained papers, parachute fabric, and carbon paper to black eyed peas. For Barnes, experimentation and risk taking are vital to her studio practice.

Exhibiting both nationally and internationally, Barnes’ 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. Solo exhibitions and projects include her current 40-foot wide painting and sculpture installation, Replotted Paths & Replanted Gardens in the Tom Bradley International Terminal of the Los Angeles Airport (LAX) and Improvisations of a Polyrhythmic Being at Patricia Sweetow Gallery. Notable group exhibitions include Risky Business: A Painter’s Forum at the Torrance Art Museum (2024), an exhibition of recent acquisitions at the Crocker Art Museum (2022); Adornment /Artifact, supported by The Getty and curated by jill moniz (2022); and at the California African American Museum, Hard Edged: Geometrical Abstraction (2015) as well as an important Survey Exhibition of African American Artists in Los Angeles, Pathways 1966-89 curated by Dale Brockman Davis (2005).

Barnes’ work is held in the permanent collections of the California African Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the UCLA Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies, the City of Inglewood, 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 been an undergraduate student of renown artist and historian, Samella Lewis. A lifelong creative, Barnes was also formerly engaged in music as a songwriter, credited on numerous recordings featuring major artists.

Sharon Barnes is of African American and Cape Verdean ancestry, She is a fifth generation Californian born in Sacramento, CA. In her early childhood, her parents moved their family from Sacramento to Los Angeles where Barnes has continued to live and work.

STATEMENT

I’d define my work a jazzification of the formal, a claiming of space, a making of mark. My embrace of abstraction challenges easy notions of Black representation by using the intuitive, disruptive, and evocative languages of abstraction rather than methods of literal depiction. I enjoy the way that abstract art can contemplate many things, on many levels, all at once.