New City Arts presents Above Ground, an exhibition of paintings by Charlottesville area artist Sharon Shapiro.
New City Arts' Welcome Gallery
114 3rd St. NE, Charlottesville, VA 22902
First Fridays
April 7, 5:00–7:30 PM
Artist talk at 6:00 PM
Free and open to the public. All ages welcome.
Gallery Hours
12:00-4:00 PM, Monday–Friday
Brown Bag Lunch with the Artist
Monday, April 17, at 12:00 PM
Sponsors
Welcome Gallery Exhibit Opening Receptions are presented by Northwestern Mutual and sponsored by Wegmans and Veritas Vineyard & Winery. December 2016-June 2017 exhibits at Welcome Gallery are made possible by an Enriching Communities grant from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation.
Exhibition Statement (provided by the artist)
I paint the bittersweet: what we mean not to lose. I sift through others’ old photos, where I find images that I knit together with my own memories. For this body of work, I began by purchasing photos on eBay from combining search terms such as: backyards, swimming pools, 1970s, girls. When inspected closely, found photographs can reveal a deeper tension than what was intended. I examine figures in discarded snapshots and then place them in the new context of my work. Desire, fragility, and insatiable yearning lurk beneath the surface of what we see. My work skims the underside of that hard lake.
About the Artist (provided by the artist)
For over 20 years, Sharon Shapiro’s figurative paintings and works on paper have been exhibited in numerous venues including shows in Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, New York, Los Angeles and London. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at {Poem88} Gallery in Atlanta, GA; Brenau University in Gainesville, GA; and Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, VA. In addition to being published in catalogues produced for these solo exhibitions as well as a hardbound catalogue for a group exhibition examining female identity in contemporary art published by the University of Central Missouri, her work has been featured in three issues of New American Paintings, and as the cover image for Volume 39. Shapiro has been a resident at Jentel Artist Residency, Banner, WY; Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, IL; the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Amherst, VA; the Ucross Foundation, Sheridan, WY; and the Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences, Rabun Gap, GA and is a past recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship. Her work is in a number of important collections throughout the United States, such as The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta, GA and the Tullman Collection, Chicago, IL. Shapiro holds a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and currently lives and works outside of Charlottesville, VA. Welcome Gallery was Sharon's studio space from 1996-2001.
Image courtesy of the artist:
”Cure For Pain,” oil on canvas, 40” x 60”, 2016.
