Artist Spotlight
Sarah Shebaro
By Tyler Noland, SOU ’21
The Winter Term visiting artist and scholar in teaching (VAST) resident, Sarah Shebaro is an artist, instructor, and co-founder of Striped Light, a letterpress shop, gallery, and recording studio in Knoxville, Tennessee. With a masters in printmaking from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Shebaro has devoted her career to a love of letterpress and original designs. She is currently in the seventh week of her printmaking class at the Oregon Center for the Arts, and has a solo exhibition up in the Boise Cascade Gallery in the Marion Ady art building.
Her Solo Exhibition entitled, “A Time and a Place” features work she produced only since arriving in Ashland at the beginning of January. Opening on February 7th, and running through the 28th, her exhibition lines the walls of the Boise Cascade Gallery in the Marion Ady Building, with prints and paintings that often have repeating motifs that draw viewers into a pattern. The exhibition statement reads, “A visual reaction to wading through layers of biased visual history, the overlooked piles of images/icons/objects that propel us through everyday life and saying the wrong thing at the worst time.” Her work often has pop art tendencies with the use of iconography and the repetition of objects. For instance, macaroni is a recurring image in her recent works with this exhibition being no exception. Shebaro is one of many artists keeping the art of printmaking and the letterpress alive. Possessing a revived passion for analog media, her work teaches that using older processes changes the creative flow. Printmaking is a revived artform, and something that is here stay with a new generation of artists.
At the first FREE Family Day of the term, Shebaro led a Styrofoam relief printing activity met with wild success. On Saturday March 7th, 2020 from 10:00 to 1:00pm she will be leading another printmaking activity for FREE Family Day in the Marion Ady Building printmaking studio next to the museum, providing the public with free printmaking experience with an expert. Sarah Shebaro’s work will be up in the Boise Cascade Gallery of Southern Oregon University’s Marion Ady art building until the 28th of February. For more information on Sarah Shebaro visit sshebaro.com.
Tyler Noland is a junior Creative Writing major at Southern Oregon University. She is originally from the Bay Area, and this is her second year at the Schneider Museum of Art. While not working on her writing she enjoys thrifting for her newest funky outfit.