RECENT, CURRENT + UPCOMING

  • Tender Wild (solo exhibition) @ Spectrum Fine Art (Seattle, WA)

  • Curatorial Squad: In the House @ Pen + Brush (New York, NY)

  • Forbidden Fruit @ Tracey Morgan Gallery (Asheville, NC)

  • ARTFIELDS, City-Wide Art Festival + Competition (Lake City, SC)

  • MATRIARCHY @ Pacific Design Center with Art Wolf Gallery (Los Angeles, LA) - click for catalogue

  • New South IV @ Kai Lin Art (Atlanta, GA)

  • Radius 250 @ Artspace (Richmond, VA)

  • Good on Paper @ Foyer Art Gallery (Richmond, VA)

  • TENFOLD @ CAN Foundation Gallery (Newport News, VA)

  • 29th Annual No Dead Artists @ Ferrara Showman Gallery (New Orleans, LA)

  • New River Biennial @ Moss Arts Center (Blacksburg, VA)

  • Cherry Picked @ Spectrum Fine Art (Seattle, WA)

  • Seattle Art Fair with Spectrum Fine Art (Seattle, WA)

  • Stars Above Us, Gallery B (Castine, ME)

SHARON SHAPIRO: TENDER WILD

Spectrum Fine Art
May 7 - June 20, 2026
Artist’s Reception: Thursday, May 14, 2026 from 6-9pm
(Seattle, WA)

Details

Statement

My work examines the gap between society's expectations and a vivid inner life. Through contemporary female experience, I explore the friction between imagination and reality, utopia and dystopia, lightness and discomfort. In collaboration, I photograph women and translate these images into paintings that revisit formative moments of change through the lens of experience. Positioning women within sites of spectacle, such as museum dioramas or football fields, reveals uneasy thresholds. Posture and expression register the rawness of transformation. Wild animals, staged within the American imagination, mirror depictions of women as both mystical beings and assailable prey. Saturated palettes draw from flags, weather maps, and chakra diagrams, further blending constructed and interior worlds. This blurring holds tension between fragility and defiance as containment falters. At a time of mounting threats to female autonomy and the natural world, these scenes insist on presence, agency, and refusal.

CURATORIAL SQUAD: IN THE HOUSE

Pen + Brush
April 30 - June 30, 2026
Opening Reception: April 29, 2026
(NYC)

Details

Sharon Shapiro’s paintings are built on emotional architecture. The paintings feel staged the way memory is, part document, part hallucination. You’re not just seeing a scene; you’re watching a psychological state take shape.

Her focus on young female figures sits in a charged space. There’s a clear effort to reclaim girlhood as complex and self-aware, not passive. At the same time a tension remains: the figures are still being looked at as much as they’re expressing themselves. That ambiguity is where the work either sharpens or risks echoing what it critiques.

Formally, she thrives on collision, lush color against decay, and florals against unease, animals that read as both protective and threatening. It’s in these contradictions that the work feels most alive.

- Vida Sabbaghi, Founder of COPE NYC

FORBIDDEN FRUIT

Tracey Morgan Gallery
April 2 - May 9, 2026

Details

NO DEAD ARTISTS

Ferrara Showman Gallery
September 19 - November 1, 2025

Details

NEW RIVER BIENNIAL

Moss Arts Center, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA
June 5 - August 23, 2025

Details

NO MAN’S LAND

Quirk Gallery, Richmond, VA
January 11 - February 11, 2024

Press Release

Sharon Shapiro: Fever Dream

Garvey|Simon Projects, New York, NY
January 21 - June 16, 2022

Sharon Shapiro: Social Fabric

Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, VA
June 4 - July 23, 2021

Press: C-Ville Weekly
The Deep End: Sharon Shapiro’s new show reflects America through a swimming pool — Sarah Sargent

Video: Social Fabric

Unfurled

Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at Maine College of Art, Portland, ME
MFA Thesis Exhibition
May - July, 2019

Press: Booooooom.com
Sharon Shapiro - Unfurled

It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity

Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, VA
2004

Half of What You See

Brenau University Art Gallery, Gainesville, GA
2007