SHARON BARNES – Improvisations of a Polyrhythmic Being / SHARON BARNES – Improvisations of a Polyrhythmic Being

Sharon Barnes

Improvisations of a Polyrythmic Being

Exhibition Dates: September 14 – October 19, 2024
Reception: Saturday, September 14th from 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm

🗓️ Saturday, October 5th at 1:00 pm:
SHANA NYS DAMBROT IN CONVERSATION with Sharon Barnes & Demetri Broxton

We’ve invited Shana Nys Dambrot, who recently received the 2024 Los Angeles Press Club Award for Art Critic of the Year, to lead the artists in what will undeniably be a riveting conversation!! Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown Los Angeles. A contributor to the Village Voice, Flaunt, Artillery, and other culture publications, she was the Arts Editor at LA Weekly until 2024. Recently Dambrot co-founded 13 Things LA on Substack, a weekly Art Calendar featuring curated reviews & recommendations in Los Angeles.

Shana Nys studied Art History at Vassar College, writes book and catalog essays, curates and juries exhibitions, is a dedicated Instagram photographer, and is the author of the experimental novella Zen Psychosis (2020, Griffith Moon). She speaks at galleries, schools, and cultural institutions nationally, and is a recipient of the Rabkin Foundation Art Writing Prize (2022), the MOZAIK Future Art Writers Grant (2024 & 2022), and the last, but not least, the LA Press Club National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Critic of the Year Award (2024 & 2022).

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It’s with great pleasure that PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY announces concurrent one-person exhibitions with Los Angeles painter Sharon Barnes, Improvisations of a Polyrhythmic Being and Oakland multidisciplinary artist Demetri Broxton, Ancestral Echoes. Both artists are steeped in conceptual practices, using collage and nontraditional materials to celebrate and honor Black endurance, distinction and achievements.

‘The Space of Time Danced Through (Improvisations of a Polyrhythmic Being)’ is a series that gleans from ways that Black music – not only in its form, but in the way it has often functioned as a psychological and metaphysical mechanism for managing both the pain and joy in life, producing the distinctly American art forms of blues, field hollers, gospel, jazz, party music, and protest songs.” – Sharon Barnes

With roots in the music industry as a songwriter, Sharon Barnes lyrical, non-objective paintings hold in their making and materials social and political stories of ancestral remembrance and fierce self-determination. That an abstract painting personifies the conceptual framework of resistance, joy, and resilience has history. During the dissolution of Czarist Russia, Malevich wrote, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism” (1916), describing abstract painting as the new realism. This revolutionary, nonobjective painting style embodied the politics and worldview of a new era, as well as a clear demarcation from the failed institutions of Czarist Russia.

Barnes understands the seminal power abstraction delivers. Her visual and poetic expression emerged from her decades-long evolution in thinking and working within interiority, the liminal space that is abstract thinking. The ‘figure’ of the painting is Barnes’ implied embodiment of Black history and culture within an abstract form. She expresses this conceptual accommodation so deftly: I’m using the open-ended languages of abstraction alongside the poetic resonance of process and materials so I can point to, without literally depicting, the layered complexities surrounding identity, culture, and Black lived experience. I frequently infuse my works with culturally reverberant materials. Black-eyed peas, sweet tea, quotidian items, and other such materials, as they find their way into the physical and conceptual layers of my work.

Sharon Barnes is a fifth generation Californian born in Sacramento, CA. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Barnes earned her MFA at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles. A lifelong creative, she was also formerly engaged in music as a songwriter, credited on numerous recordings featuring major artists.

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), an exhibition of recent acquisitions at the Crocker Art Museum (2022); Adornment /Artifact, supported by The Getty and curated by jill moniz (2022); and at the California African American Museum, Hard Edged: Geometrical Abstraction (2015) as well as an important Survey Exhibition of African American Artists in Los Angeles, Pathways 1966-89 curated by Dale Brockman Davis (2005).

Barnes’ work is held in the permanent collections of the California African Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the UCLA 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.