Second Street Gallery is pleased to announce Social Fabric, a solo exhibition by Charlottesville artist Sharon Shapiro on view in the Main Gallery from June 4 – July 23, 2021.

In Social Fabric, Sharon Shapiro engages multiple dichotomies: reality and fantasy, utopian and dystopian. Inspired by personal events, local lore, and pop-cultural references, she presents a world where time coalesces and collapses. Beauty serves as a temptation for the viewer, but cracks in the artifice reveal obscured narratives and hidden meanings upon closer inspection. Using nostalgia to assail our failing social memory, her work challenges the viewer to differentiate between mythology and history and question broader cultural narratives. Shapiro confronts the sexism and racism of the past and present with imagery from vintage Ebony magazines, old postcards of waterfalls and scenic parks, 1960s-era Better Homes and Gardens magazines, and her own recent photographs of models in abandoned pools. Unsettling scenes of oblivious white suburbia are juxtaposed with social injustices of the midcentury and current struggles against Confederate monuments. Chronicling the complexities of growing up a white female in America, particularly the South, the works knit together disparate yet coexistent realities punctuated by recurring images of swimming pools, American flags, chandeliers, and lambs. Social Fabric lures us into the past to force us to confront our life-long complicity in America's history.

Since 1995, Shapiro's paintings and works on paper have been exhibited widely, including solo shows in Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles. In 2009, the University of Central Missouri published a hardbound catalog featuring her work to accompany an exhibition examining female identity in contemporary art. Her work has been featured in three issues of New American Paintings, and as the cover image for Volume 39. Shapiro has been a resident at Jentel Artist Residency, Banner, WY; Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, IL; the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VCCA), Amherst, VA; the Ucross Foundation, Sheridan, WY; and the Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences, Rabun Gap, GA is a 2002 and 2018 recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship. In 2020 she was awarded the Atelier Focus Fellowship at AIR Serenbe Institute in Georgia. Her work is included in several prominent collections throughout the United States, such as The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA), Atlanta, GA, and the Tullman Collection, Chicago, IL. Shapiro holds an MFA from the Maine College of Art (MECA) and a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art. She currently lives and works in Charlottesville, VA, and shows her work with {Poem88} Gallery in Atlanta and Garvey|Simon in New York City.