Sharon Louden is an artist, educator, advocate for artists, editor of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series of books, and the Artistic Director of the Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution. Louden explains that her artwork is about “giving character to individual gestures through the illusion of movement, placement, and direction of marks.” She maintains an ongoing dialogue with these forms, or “creatures,” explaining that they originated from bodies in motion and attitudes of posture. She spent her Tamarind residency focused on making immediate, specific choices as opposed to her usual process of editing several hundred drawings. This shift led her to consider the prints she created at Tamarind to be some of her most unique works.
Louden graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale University School of Art. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues and her work is held in major public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art, Arkansas Arts Center, Yale University Art Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
