SHARON BARNES

Sharon Barnes was born in Sacramento and raised in South Los Angeles. She works across painting, sculpture, and installation, merging contemporary abstraction with narratives that glean from personal and collective memory, social discourse, and poetics. Her mixed media paintings create metaphors through haptic layers of paint and hundreds of collaged fragments while her free-standing and suspended sculptures seek equilibrium within a riot of disparate materials.

Barnes earned her MFA in Fine Arts from Otis College of Art & Design. She is the recipient of the Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Master Artist Fellowship and a MacDowell Fellowship, among other honors and residencies. Her work is part of several public collections including the City of Inglewood, the Crocker Art Museum, and the California African American Museum. One of her large-scale installations is currently on view through 2024 in the Tom Bradley International Terminal of the Los Angeles Airport. Celebrating her ancestors who were Black pioneers who sought freedom and opportunity in early California, the installation includes a 20-foot-wide painting on canvas and a large-scale suspended sculptural work. Barnes' work was also recently selected by the State Department’s Art in Embassies Program for the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.