CV/Bio
Sharon Kerry-Harlan is known for her elaborate large-scale textile works, collages, and paintings that capture the music of human experience through its various shapes, patterns, and perspectives. She’s a master at weaving together the many disparate voices of past, present, and future, from the Black human faces presented in her art quilts to the rusted outlines of farming equipment preserved in her original “rust-dyed” textile patterns. Her work explores elements of her ancestry while resonating with a clear understanding of both the chaos and the order of modern, metropolitan life. “As an artist, I have a sense of obligation to leave a mark behind—to let future generations know what is happening and how it’s happening. It’s important to preserve information from a variety of sources, not just those in power.”
She’s moved by the quick turnaround characteristic of modern cities, inspired by the density and bustling energy these places emit. “It’s the many faces seen in a flash, the snippet of conversation overheard on a crowded street, the way people tend to come and go endlessly, repeatedly.” Her art quilts and paper collages can be seen as visual jazz improvisations, moving and playing with vibrant, percussive rhythms, balancing geometric shapes with figural curves, noise with spaces of rest. Her works often feature asymmetrical organization, large mask-like facial features, and ornate embellishment. There is a hieroglyphic visual intelligence to many of her pieces that feels both carefully organized and on the verge of erupting into chaos.
Kerry-Harlan grew up with extensive exposure to art from a young age, attending private boarding schools that emphasized fine arts and participating in art competitions and exhibits. She learned quilting techniques from her mother, Lela McDowell, a thorough and skilled quilter. From her uncle, Marion Sampler, an L.A. educator and artist known for his collages and abstract, geometric graphic design, she learned how to live the life of an artist. “Sometimes I feel like I channel him. I have a picture of him in my studio, and I check in with him every now and then for inspiration.”
Kerry-Harlan moved to the Midwest as an adult, where she graduated summa cum laude from Marquette University, married, started a family, and worked as an Academic Coordinator at Marquette University. She also taught textile and quilting courses as an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. At the same time, she began taking classes at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, developing her body of work alongside her professional career.
Kerry-Harlan is perhaps best known for her distinctive manipulation of fabrics for her larger mixed-media and textile works, a process she developed that became a turning point in her career. “I wanted to make quilts that spoke to and for African-Americans—with those kinds of faces on them. And that wasn’t something commercially available then. So I made my own. And once I started to explore that process, I kept going.” She moves freely between collage, textile work, photography, and painting, letting one material inform the others and often uses the same materials in a series of interconnected works. “Creating art has taught me that you can’t remain static, in life or in work. You can look back and report the past, you can illustrate the present, suggest ideas about the possible future, but you can’t stay still. You can’t stand in one place.”
Now retired from the educational field and focused full-time on making art, Kerry-Harlan continues to create and experiment with fabric manipulation in her characteristic large-scale mixed-media and painted works. Her works have been collected and exhibited by museums across the country and internationally.