I am a visual artist and educator originally from New York City. I teach drawing, painting, and visual studies which include an interest in aesthetics, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and art history. My visual work explores how we are conditioned by history, geography, and the society we live in. I have shown my work across the country, including the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, WA, the Ali Center in Louisville, KY, and Pocket Utopia in NYC. I have attended artist residencies, including Virginia Center for Creative Art, Greenwoods 58, and Centrum. I maintain a studio in Olympia during the school year and one in the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York during the summer. To learn more about my work please visit my website shawosha.net
Education
M.F.A., Visual Art, Vermont College of Fine Art, 2009; B.S., Nursing, Columbia University, 1985.
Teaching Style
I enjoy teaching art at Evergreen because full-time programs allow us to build strong artistic learning communities with our students and to develop a deeper relationship with the themes and processes we are studying. I teach theory and practice together, which includes both how to work with the materials of drawing and painting and how to consider historical context and what art forms mean in our society. Artmaking needs a subject and combines easily with the content of other fields, not as illustration but as material and conceptual inquiry about our surrounding world and us in it. Art programs at Evergreen offer emerging, new, and living curricula. I team-teach with amazing colleagues from other fields and have taught programs that investigated hybridity and critical race theory, current issues of interdependence and wellness in critical psychology and art, cities as living and historically structured sites, the formal concerns of animation and painting, and the relationship of art to work/labor/collectivity.