Sharita Towne

Media

Interdisciplinary

CUrrentLY

Adjunct professor in Intermedia, Thesis, and Critical Studies, at Pacific Northwest College of Art

Background

In prior years, Sharita Towne was a teaching assistant on a Fulbright grant in Bahia, Brazil, and served as an instructor for the Portland African American Leadership Form & SEI as well as video at Portland State University. She served as a cultural ambassador for the North American Language and Culture Assistant Program in Sevilla, Spain. Towne is a research-based video artist and printmaker most interested in creating interdisciplinary community art projects that engage local and global Black geographies, histories and possibilities. Her interests lie in unpacking the inherited struggles of past burdens and in affording collective catharsis. Her practice takes on the past, surveys the present and demands a better future by creating counter-archives to recorded history. Her work has been exhibited in Portland, Oregon; Seattle; Cleveland; Ann Arbor, Mich.; at PSI MoMA in New York City; the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans; the Brooklyn Museum in New York City; and the Buenos Aires Faena Arts Center. She received a Bachelor of Arts in interdisciplinary studies with honors from the University of California, Berkeley, followed by a Master of Fine Arts in contemporary art practices from Portland State University.

Artist Quote:

“Within the framework of a city and state built on exclusion, not unlike other places, my hope with my latest work is that new blueprints can be envisioned and that art can point us toward a spatialized repair, reform, and restructuring of the place we live.”