Shelley Lowell

November 17 through January 5, 2014 Shelley Lowell was born in the Bronx, NY in 1946 and started drawing before she was four years of age. She graduated Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, with a BFA in Advertising Design & Visual Communications. She is a painter, sculptor, illustrator and designer as well as poet. Her paintings are allegorical stylized surreal landscapes. These works inspire poetic stories. She has been writing poetry since the early 1970s and performed them in Asheville, NC, the Metropolitan Washington DC area and New England. Many have been published and recorded. Her current paintings and their inspired poems have been in solo exhibits. She performs the paintings’ poetry at her solo art show receptions. Her illustrations have been published in print advertising, brochures and books. She won the prestigious New York Society of Illustrators Award of Merit and many other awards for her paintings and graphic designs. Her artwork and designs have been published in numerous books and publications. She is also known for her commissioned pet paintings. This work can be seen at www.GreatPetPaintings.com. Her landscape paintings with their poems are her way to communicate her inner-self and her reactions to her surroundings. Her artistic ability was developed over the last 40+ years expressed as contemporary artwork with an edge, a statement and a message. Early in her artistic career (1970s), her art earned her the label of New York City feminist representational and social commentary visual artist as she produced monumental original artwork and poetry as a counter statement to what she felt as demeaning aspects of the sexual revolution of the period. This artwork was in exhibits with such notable feminist artists as Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Joan Semmel, Anne Sharp, Linda Benglis, Agnes Denes, Hannah Wilke, Sylvia Sleigh and Judith Bernstein to name a few. Her feminist art is in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Feminist Art Base on the Brooklyn Museum web site. This work has been in museum and gallery exhibits and published in feminist art journals and publications. Biographical information and image of one of her paintings is in Women Artists of America II. Throughout her artistic career, she has maintained a thread of communicating messages or making statements in her art due, no doubt, to her studying Advertising Design & Visual Communications at Pratt Institute. Her messages and statements have changed as she has grown artistically and personally, but her statements are always been about humanity and the human condition. She has always remained an innovator in her art. Her work is in corporate and private collections. Aside from her inclusion in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Feminist Art Base, she is also in Clara, the Archive Library of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC), and WAAND, the feminist woman artists data base at Rutgers University. She resides in Danbury, CT where she has her studio.