Contemporary visual practice has increasingly embraced a language of hybridity, where painting, sculpture, collage, and installation merge to create layered narratives that move beyond the walls of traditional galleries. Large-scale works commissioned for civic and international spaces, such as airports, museums, and embassies, demonstrate how art now functions as an aesthetic statement and a form of cultural diplomacy and public storytelling. These immersive environments often engage memory, identity, and community and employ mixed media and tactile mark-making to construct what critics have described as "soft monuments," spaces that honor heritage and invite dialogue. Such practices mirror broader currents in global art, where interdisciplinary approaches and material experimentation are at the forefront of curatorial interest and institutional support.
Within this landscape, African American artists have gained growing visibility in recent years, with major museums and galleries foregrounding works that explore diasporic histories and contemporary Black experiences. Their contributions, from survey exhibitions to international commissions, reflect a movement that blends personal narrative with collective memory, while simultaneously addressing issues of place, belonging, and resilience. Positioned within this evolving field is an American interdisciplinary artist whose career bridges songwriting and visual art, whose public installations stretch across international terminals and embassies, and whose works are housed in respected museum collections. Her practice, rooted in narrative, layered materiality, and cultural reflection, places her firmly within the dialogue of contemporary art's most vital trends: the intersection of identity, memory, and monumental public expression. This artist is Sharon Louise Barnes.
Sharon Barnes was born on November 2, 1949, in Sacramento, California. Before committing to visual art, she worked in the music industry as a songwriter and studied film, experiences that later informed the rhythmic qualities of her visual practice. As an American interdisciplinary artist, she works across painting, sculpture, and installation, combining media to create narrative-driven compositions rooted in personal and social histories. To refine her critical approach and artistic process, she earned an MFA in Fine Arts from Otis College of Art & Design in 2021. Her career spans solo exhibitions at Patricia Sweetow Gallery in Los Angeles, Band of Vices Gallery in Los Angeles, and September Gray Gallery in Atlanta, as well as participation in key group exhibitions such as Innervisions at Clark Atlanta University Museum, Risky Business at the Torrance Art Museum, and Pathways: A Survey Exhibition 1969–1989 curated by Dale Brockman Davis. Her work has been acquired by multiple 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. Recognition of her practice includes a McDowell Fellowship in New Hampshire and the Los Angeles Individual Master Artist Fellowship (COLA). Beyond museum collections, her large-scale public installations are permanently installed at the Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport and the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, through the U.S. State Department's Art in Embassies program. Barnes was previously married to musician and producer John Barnes, with whom she has two children, John J. Barnes III and Kristin Barnes.
Barnes began exhibiting in the late 1990s, developing a practice she identifies as "Social Abstraction," which combines formal experimentation with engagement in social and cultural issues. A fifth-generation Californian, she lives and works in Los Angeles, where she draws from the city's cultural and cosmopolitan environment while maintaining connections to broader artistic centers such as New York and Madrid. Her exhibitions include Straddling the Whirlwind, a solo presentation at Band of Vices, and earlier projects in Los Angeles and Atlanta. Her artistic references and affinities extend to figures such as Julie Mehretu and Jack Whitten, and her process is often accompanied by listening to jazz, hip hop, or Afrobeat, though she also works in silence. In works such as When the Music Ends There is Remainder, a Persistence Lingering in the Breach (Fred Moten) (2024), Barnes fuses acrylic, ink, oil crayon, fabric dye, thread, burlap, and salvaged canvas into a surface that resists singular reading, embodying the "breach".
Similarly, I'm Going Where Chilly Winds Don't Blow (for Nina Simone) (2021) layers acrylic, ink, oil, wood veneer, and collaged fragments of paper and cardboard. Both pieces treat material as language. Straddle the Whirlwind (2021), previously shown in her solo exhibition, extends this logic: a mixed media composition that stages turbulence as a formal strategy and social condition, inviting viewers to stand within the vortex of fragmentation and assembly. Across these works, cutting, layering, and stitching become less a technique than a philosophy, an avant-garde insistence that art can speak through rupture, through residue, through the impossibility of containment. Her abstract works move beyond surface aesthetics, operating as layered investigations into memory, history, and cultural presence. The materials become carriers of social and personal narratives, embedding meaning within their textures. Each composition opens pathways that engage literature, music, and lived experience. In this way, her abstraction functions less as a formal experiment and more as a site of depth, where visual language intersects with histories that are often felt before they are seen.
