Art has long stood as one of the most enduring means of expression, allowing individuals to give form to ideas, emotions, and histories that cannot be fully contained by language alone. It serves as a mirror and an archive, from painting to performance, capturing the personal while simultaneously reflecting collective experience. Making art for many creators is inseparable from storytelling, whether through direct imagery or abstraction that evokes memory, conflict, or aspiration in more subtle ways. In this sense, art is not limited to the object itself but extends into the processes of cutting, layering, carving, and assembling, each gesture embodying thought, struggle, or revelation. Across cultures and generations, it has provided a means to preserve heritage, confront social realities, and situate the self within the broader flow of history.
This expressive potential has been expanded through interdisciplinary approaches that merge painting, sculpture, installation, and collage into hybrid forms. Artists working in this way often employ salvaged or unconventional materials, burlap, wood veneer, paper, or thread, not simply for their visual qualities but for the resonance carried within them, signaling labor, resilience, and memory. These works are not designed for quick consumption, demanding patience, reflection, and a willingness to inhabit complexity. They speak to personal legacies and social urgencies, drawing equally from literature, music, and politics to create layered compositions that refuse to settle into a single narrative. Sharon Louise Barnes, whose work embodies these ideas with both breadth and intensity, is positioned at the forefront of this practice.
Sharon Barnes was born on November 2, 1949, in Sacramento, California. She is an American interdisciplinary visual artist who works across painting, sculpture, and installation. Earlier in her career, she worked in the music industry as a songwriter for recording artists and also studied film before turning to visual art. She began exhibiting her work in the late 1990s and later pursued formal education, earning an MFA in Fine Arts from Otis College of Art & Design in 2021. Her practice, which she identifies as “Social Abstraction,” combines formal aesthetics with engagement in social concerns. She describes this approach as a melding process with issues rooted in personal and collective experience. Alongside her studio practice, Barnes has noted that if she were not a visual artist, she would likely have worked as a writer or landscape designer, reflecting a continued interest in creative expression across multiple fields. Barnes’s work is represented in the permanent collections of several institutions, including the California African American Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the Clark Atlanta University Museum, and the UCLA Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies. Her installations are also part of large-scale public art projects, including permanent works at the Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport and at the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, commissioned through the U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies program.
She has received notable fellowships and awards, including a McDowell Fellowship in New Hampshire and the Los Angeles Individual Master Artist Fellowship (COLA). Her exhibition record includes solo presentations with Patricia Sweetow Gallery in Los Angeles, Band of Vices Gallery in Los Angeles, and September Gray Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. She has also participated in group shows such as Innervisions at the Clark Atlanta University Museum and Risky Business at the Torrance Art Museum. In addition, she was included in Pathways: A Survey Exhibition 1969–1989, curated by Dale Brockman Davis, which highlighted African American artists in Los Angeles. Her exhibitions have included Straddling the Whirlwind, a solo presentation at Band of Vices, and other works in Los Angeles and Atlanta. Additional pieces listed among her projects include When the Music Ends There is Remainder, a Persistence Lingering in the Breach (Fred Moten) (2024), a 60-by-48-inch mixed media painting incorporating acrylic, ink, oil crayon, fabric dye, thread, burlap, and salvaged canvas on canvas. Another work, I’m Going Where Chilly Winds Don’t Blow (for Nina Simone) (2021), is a 60-by-80-inch canvas created with acrylic, ink, oil, wood veneer, punched and cut paper, cardboard, and other mixed media collage. Straddle the Whirlwind (2021), a 30-by-48-inch mixed media painting on canvas, was sold following its exhibition.
Barnes has discussed her trajectory as an artist in interviews, noting that she has always seen herself as a creative person. She began her career in the music industry in her early twenties and later transitioned into visual art, with graduate study at Otis undertaken after she was already working professionally. She has also cited her roots in Los Angeles as central to her practice, identifying herself as a fifth-generation Californian with a strong connection to the cultural and cosmopolitan environment of the city. Her personal life includes a previous marriage to musician and producer John Barnes. Together, they have two children, John J. Barnes III and Kristin Barnes.
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