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Sharon Siskin
Sharon Siskin

Email: sharonsiskin@att.net

Biography

BFA, Tyler School of Art, Temple University; MA, University of New Mexico, MFA, University of California at Berkeley. Sharon Siskin has an extensive national exhibition record, showing her work in museums, galleries and public sites for more than 30 years. She is the recipient of awards and grants that include a Visual Arts Fellowship from the California Arts Council in 2003, the 2001 Potrero Nuevo Prize, Noetic Arts Program Community Grant, San Francisco Arts Commission Market Street Art in Transit Commission and 12 California Arts Council Artist in Residence Grants for community-based public art projects in the San Francisco Bay Area AIDS support service community and in the City of Berkeley homeless women and children services community. She was the Artist in Residence at San Francisco Recycling & Disposal, Inc. in the summer of 2004. Her artwork has been featured in numerous publications including Notes on the Need for Beauty: An Intimate Look at an Essential Quality (2007), by J.Ruth Gendler; Women Artists in the American West (2003), edited by Susan Ressler, Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society (1997), by Lucy Lippard, Connecting Conversations: Interviews with 28 Bay Area Women Artists (1988), edited by Moira Roth and Site to Sight, Mapping Bay Area Visual Culture (1995), edited by Lydia Mathiews.

She has taught for 5 years as an Assistant Professor as a member of the full-time faculty at University of San Francisco and for 18 years as Core Faculty and Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Department of Arts and Consciousness at John F. Kennedy University and at California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco Art Institute, California State University at Hayward, Goddard College and the University of New Mexico as well as at several California Community Colleges. Currently, she is a Faculty Advisor at Goddard College’s low-residency MFAIA Program in Port Townsend, Washington; an Adjunct Professor in the Community Arts Program at California College of the Arts and at John F. Kennedy University and is teaching at Berkeley City College and Chabot College.

She is a recognized leader in the field of community-based public art and is the founder of Positive Art in 1988-present, an art project in the Bay Area AIDS service community. She has lectured extensively in art colleges, universities, professional conferences, galleries and museums throughout the United States.

Her work as a community-based art professor is featured in a newly released book entitled Outside the Frame: Teaching Art for Social Change, by Beverly Naidus, published by New Village Press in 2009. She was the featured artist in the summer 2009 issue of The Contemporary West, published by Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. Her studio artwork will be featured in a book about contemporary political and social practices in the arts by Seattle-based art writer Susan Platt, entitled Art and Politics Now: Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis. Her work will also be included in Singers of Tales: Documenting the work of Women Environmental Artists, by Anna Clarke and Elizabeth Pasterfield-Li.

Sharon’s website is:
Other links to Sharon’s work:
http://www.sfrecyclinganddisposal.com/AIR/siskin.php?t=d