Meet Shawn Powell

Today we’d like to introduce you to Shawn Powell. 

Hi Shawn, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I grew up in the small, rural town of Saint Clair, Missouri. Although I really liked making art at the time, I didn’t have any clue of what it meant to be an artist or how to become one. While I was attending East Central Community College and thinking about getting a degree in graphic design, I took part in a field trip to the St. Louis Art Museum as part of an art appreciation course. It was impactful experience for me, and I was moved by the works I saw in the modern and contemporary art sections. Even though I didn’t understand much about this work, I was curious about the artists’ intentions and how the work impacted my thoughts and senses. 

With the encouragement and support of my instructors, I applied and was accepted into the Kansas City Art Institute where I received a BFA in Painting and Art History. This is where I really began to develop as an artist, thanks to dedicated professors and a strong cohort of students. I am very grateful for my time there. I then was accepted into the MFA program at Hunter College in New York City and began to polish the conceptual aspects of my work alongside a large network of interdisciplinary artists. My interest in color expanded while working with professors that are part of “the Hunter Color School,” a group of artists that each, in their own way, investigated color and color theory as major parts of their practice. I spent nearly 15 years living and working in New York. While there, I was an adjunct professor at Hunter College and Westchester Community College until being awarded a tenure track position at Kent State University here in Kent, Ohio where I am now an Associate Professor of Painting and currently serve as the Graduate Coordinator of the School of Art. It is an excellent Research 1 institution, and we just announced a fully funded MFA program in Studio Art and well-funded MA Art History and Art Education programs, all with large, competitive teaching stipends; so, exciting things are happening in Kent! 

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Not many artists or educators have a smooth road. They are precarious professions, with few opportunities and often without a straight line to success. I grew up in a working-class family of seven in a small trailer in the woods, took out a lot of student loans to attend college, and experienced the exhaustion of working as an adjunct professor across colleges that were hours away from each other alongside several other part-time jobs, such as freelance art handling. Finding time to continue to create paintings after graduate school was not easy, but essential to success. However, these circumstances do not feel like they are uncommon struggles for many artists, especially living in an expensive city like NYC. Despite humble beginnings, I am privileged in many aspects and feel very fortunate. I didn’t have to fight against many of the systemic and societal blockades that many artists face, so it’s hard to feel like I struggled even though it wasn’t an easy path to get to where I am now. 

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I am an artist, most specifically a painter. The work I create is playful and situates itself between abstraction and representation, shifting back and forth between the two. For instance, I create round, shaped paintings that look like beach umbrellas, park parasols, and hula hoops. They are the same size and shape of the actual objects I am depicting but are also a nod to the stripes, patterns, and colors of abstract painting. 

My work usually begins with a setting, a beach, or a park in recent work, which allows the group of paintings to be seen together as an overall installation. Beach towel and umbrella paintings are strewn along the gallery walls or painted grassy areas peppered with objects sit alongside round hula hoop or parasol paintings. I think this inclination to create spaces comes from my love for film as well as fiction in literature and how writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Italo Calvino or filmmakers such as Jacques Tati and Pedro Almodóvar can really transport me to a particular setting through a grouping of words or frames. This is probably also due to my time as a commercial painter making scenes and sets for theme park rides and attractions while I lived in Kansas City and St. Louis. 

One of my biggest influences is cinema, and I use a top-down viewpoint in many of my recent works. All of the objects in my paintings are seen from above through a hovering perspective. The paintings are flat yet highly rendered in what may be seen as akin to pop art or illustration as well as reductive abstraction. 

Some of the highlights from my career have been solo shows in New York at galleries such as Chapter NY, 106 Green, and The Journal Gallery. I’ve been included in group shows at Marrow Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Nada NY, New York, NY; and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Last summer, I was invited to take part in an artist residency and exhibition in Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy, which was a wonderful and unique experience. In 2021, I was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and my work was acquired by The Fidelity Art Collection and The Cleveland Clinic Art Collection. My work has been included in the CAN Journal, Cleveland.com, ArtMaze Mag, Brooklyn Magazine, the Wassaic Project, Juxtapoz Magazine, and on Vanityfair.com. 

I’m represented in the region by Abattoir Gallery, which is a wonderful space in Cleveland, OH. They have shown my work in NADA Miami, at Foreland Catskills, in the two-person show Lauren Yeager and Shawn Powell, and my recent solo show PARK. I’ve also curated two exhibitions there, Near Zero: Peter Demos and Russell Maltz as well as the exhibition The Dead Don’t Die, which looked at a diverse group of young, contemporary emerging abstract painters. My wife, curator Annie Wischmeyer, and I also run a project gallery space out of our backyard called Gazebo Gallery, which started during the pandemic. We put on one-day outdoor exhibitions in our gazebo with artists from across the country for the local Kent State community. 

What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
I don’t like to think of art as an industry, but it is in fact a major industry. I think it is best to spend time in the studio thinking about the work you want to make, the story you want to tell, and the ideas and techniques that surround it, more so than how an industry will receive it. That’s the approach I take. 

In painting, figuration and representation have been a large part of the conversation for many years now. I’m starting to see the pendulum swing back towards abstraction again and away from work that involves straightforward narratives, so I would expect that to be the trend over the next several years, even though the art world is quite plural as a constant. 

My hope (as naïve as it may be) is that as the pandemic fades, people will be more eager to view work in person and visit local museums and galleries to really see the work, something that social media does not offer, as it is merely a simulation of the work. My advice would be to view the work with your own eyes, not solely mediated through a screen and filters. Spend time with a painting instead of a swift pass and an iPhone snapshot. Try to deconstruct how it was made, what the colors are doing, why the artist chose this particular subject, and so on. I promise you will be rewarded. In my work, you never know what you might find lurking in between the blades of grass if you spend a little time with them. 

Contact Info:

• Website: www.shawnkpowell.com
• Instagram: shawnkpowell

Image Credits
Tim Safranek
Field Studio
Thomas Müller