Sharon Norwood

Sharon Norwood (born in Kingston, Jamaica) is a Jamaican-born Canadian interdisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, fiber, found objects, video, and site-specific installation. Raised in Toronto and currently based in Savannah, Georgia, Norwood examines race, gender, labor, beauty, class, colonialism, cultural memory, and the systems through which Black bodies and histories have been represented. A defining element of her visual language is the curly line, which operates simultaneously as an abstract drawing gesture and as a signifier for Afro-textured hair and the Black body.  Norwood frequently places this line onto materials associated with domestic refinement and European cultural authority—porcelain teacups, saucers, serving pieces, Wedgwood, historical prints, textiles, furniture, and architectural fragments. By inserting Black hair into these surfaces, she disrupts the presumed neutrality of decorative objects and asks viewers to reconsider histories of domestic labor, enslavement, colonial commerce, exclusion, and racialized standards of beauty. In works such as Hair Matters, The Root of the Matter, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner or Rather Tea, the curl can appear ornamental from a distance before becoming legible as hair, creating a tension between beauty, decoration, historical violence, and visibility.  Her recent practice has expanded these concerns from individual objects into broader histories of architecture and material production. Living in Savannah has prompted Norwood to investigate the city’s built environment and the labor concealed within objects associated with Southern wealth and refinement. For the forthcoming After the Island exhibitions, she works with vintage china as well as Savannah Grey bricks salvaged from her property and surrounding neighborhood, drawing connections between decorative culture, architecture, Black labor, colonial commerce, and the enslaved people whose work built and sustained these environments. At Telfair Museums’ Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters in 2023, she similarly used ceramics and mixed media to counter romanticized narratives of antebellum domestic life and center histories of unpaid labor, violence, and resistance.  Norwood earned a BFA in Painting from the University of South Florida in 2013 and an MFA in Studio Art from Florida State University in 2018. Her work has appeared at the National Gallery of Jamaica, Telfair Museums, Gardiner Museum, Mint Museum, Atlanta Contemporary, Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, Canada Gallery in London, Washington and Lee University, and other institutions internationally. She has undertaken residencies at Banff Centre, McColl Center, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hambidge Center, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, PILOTENKUECHE, Struts Gallery, and ROKTOWA in Kingston. Her works are represented in collections including the Gardiner Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Museums at Washington and Lee University, Telfair Museums, Microsoft Art Collection, and TD Bank Collection. She also operates Norwood Gallery, an artist-run exhibition space in Savannah.