BIO
Sharon Barnes is a Los Angeles-based visual artist who creates paintings, sculptures, and installations while working at the intersections of abstraction, process, and materials. Investigating the evocative possibilities of abstract visual language and a poetic use of materiality, she uses the complexities of abstraction to frame the complex nature of culture, identity, memory, and perception. Additionally interested in embodiment and the sentient, her self-described “thick-skinned paintings” possess haptic surfaces activated with acrylics, oils, inks, and a profusion of fragments that range widely from painted papers, fabric and quotidian materials to black eyed peas.
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 vitrine installation, Replotted Paths & Replanted Gardens in the Tom Bradley International Terminal of the Los Angeles Airport (LAX). Notable group exhibitions include Risky Business: A Painter’s Forum at the Torrance Art Museum (2024), a recent acquisitions exhibit at the Crocker Art Museum (2022); The Influence of African American Art in Southern California at the Ontario Art Museum (2018); and at the California African American Art Museum, Hard Edged: Geometrical Abstraction in 2015 as well as an important Survey Exhibition of African American Artists in Los Angeles, Pathways 1966-89 curated by Dale Brockman Davis in 2005.
Barnes’ work is held in the permanent collections of the California African Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the 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. Barnes was formerly engaged in music as a songwriter, credited on recordings by major artists.
Of African American and Cape Verdean ancestry, Sharon Barnes 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. Familial legacies of struggle, resilience, and belonging inform her art.