bio

Sharon Shapiro is a Virginia-based artist with a versatile painting practice. She views painting as a cunning vessel for the tension and insatiable longing that lurk beneath the surface. Working in diverse media and sizes, Shapiro portrays opposing forces in her figurative-based work: fantastic and natural, utopian and dystopian subject matter. 

Shapiro has shown throughout the United States, including one and two-person exhibitions at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, NYC; the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, Arlington, VA; {Poem 88} Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Garvey Simon Projects, NYC; and the Gadsden Museum of Art, Gadsden, AL. Her group exhibitions include the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Maine Center for Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; the McLean Project for the Arts, McLean, VA; and the Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA. She has been in residence at Ucross, Jentel, Ragdale, The Hambidge Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her practice has received grant support, including two awards from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and she was the recipient of the Atelier Focus Fellowship at AIR SFI in Georgia. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Whitewall, Art Spiel, Studio Visit, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Kolaj Magazine. Shapiro holds an MFA from the Maine College of Art and a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art. She currently lives and works in Charlottesville, VA.

statement

My art practice explores the tensions within contemporary female experience—the contrast between society’s expectations and the vibrant, often turbulent, inner self. I capture the longing and tension often beneath the surface and navigate opposing forces: imagination and reality, utopia and dystopia, lightness and discomfort. Working closely with models, I photograph moments that feel voyeuristic yet emphasize their agency. These images are collaged with personal and pop culture archives, forming semi-imaginary worlds that mirror the hidden realms many women inhabit.

Painting these women, aged 15 to 30, allows me to revisit young adulthood’s intensity with the perspective of time, viewing transformation as both a personal reckoning and a universal condition. Their bodies, rendered in paint, become sites of revelation—posture, expression, and gesture exposing the rawness of change. While deeply personal, these moments transcend my history, offering viewers a conduit to their truths.

Rooted in the cultural landscape of the American South, my work interrogates nostalgia as both a source of longing and a means of critical reflection. I counterpose placid domestic spaces with uncanny incursions—livestock, overgrowth, wild animals—playing with nature and culture as metaphors for adolescence’s uneasy transformation. Vivid palettes pull from graffiti, weather maps, and environmental extremes, alluding to both personal and planetary unrest. In an era where women's autonomy and the natural world face mounting threats, I am drawn to the tension between fragility and defiance, using intimacy and camaraderie as anchors against erasure.