Shaun Richards
Richards, born in 1977, attended UNC-Wilmington, where he earned a BA in Art in 1999. In 2003, he enrolled in SUNY Empire State College as a non-matriculated graduate student. This MSLA program afforded him a studio in Manhattan with weekly studio visits and critiques from established artists, critics, and curators. Richards left NYC in the spring of 2006, moving to Raleigh, North Carolina to pursue art full time. In November 2007, he was included in his first museum show, The Human Scale, at the Cameron Museum in Wilmington, NC. Richards was awarded 3-month residency at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE, for October-December 2009. He was the recipient of The Target Gallery's open call Solo Exhibition in October 2010, in Alexandria, Virginia. In 2012, he was included in a group exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art, titled Word Up: the intersection of Text and Image. In 2017 he had a solo exhibition in Wilmington, NC at the Wilma Daniels Gallery, and was awarded two public Art Projects for the City of Raleigh, NC. One was completed that same year, and the other in 2018. In 2020 he was included in Front Burner, a survey of contemporary North Carolina Painting at the North Carolina Museum of Art, as well as a solo Exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh (CAM-Raleigh) in 2021. Richards spent the fall of 2020 to fall of 2021 in Hamburg, Germany with his wife, Dr. Amanda Maples, a curator of African Art, and Research Coordinator for the Digital Benin Project based in Hamburg, a restitution project which researched and created a database of looted objects from he Benin Kingdom held in museums worldwide. Richards and his wife returned in October 2021 to Raleigh, NC. In 2023 he was a awarded one-month Residency at the Jentel Foundation in Banner, Wyoming. Also in 2023, he relocated to New Orleans, Louisiana with his wife who accepted a position as the Curator of African Art at the New Orleans, Museum of Art. Currently, Richards continues to hold studio and work in New Orleans.
Title
"My work centers figuration and contrasting applications of paint, the use of narrative, and an investigative use of signifiers. Conceptually, I am concerned with human incentive, artifice, and the dissection of classifications and assumptions— why we do what we do, and how this is reflected within society. The current sociopolitical polarization and its disassociative affect within North American experience is an ongoing issue in my practice since 2020. I plan to spend my time in residence continuing to address these concerns through repetition, collage, paint, and print, while examining the effects of American politics on a global scale, including Europe.
My recent work in oil, acrylic, and mixed media deliberately impresses a sense of fragmentation upon the viewer. Figural amalgamations set against a tonal space illustrate an amplified polarization within US American discourse, specifically the reliance on binary categorizations: Right vs. Left, white or BIPOC, Cis vs. nonbinary, etc.--an oppositional/polemical duality that extends throughout the Global North and beyond. Such dualities essentialize and flatten experience and identity, even as the emergence of new categories strive to counter this flattening.
