Associate Professor, Program Head of Sculpture and Graduate Program Director
Glass, Sculpture

Sharyn O’Mara

Sharyn O’Mara is an artist and educator whose interdisciplinary works explore the marks of language and the language of marks. Her practice is comprised of drawing, sculpture, glass, printmaking and installation.
 
O’Mara’s current work involves reflections on empathy and longing while living in a media-possessed culture that so often feels devoid of intimacy and trust. Deeply connected to her dogs, she works with the residue of their existence—nose prints, shed hair, cremains—taking otherwise overlooked materials and phenomena and giving them significance through intimate visual recording.
 
Her work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad including three works in the current exhibition Chameleon Effects: Glass (Un)Defined at the Toledo Museum of Art through March 2022; New Glass NOW at the Corning Museum of Glass, an exhibition of the top 100 international works in glass of 2018 that will travel to the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Fall 2021, and recent work in River of Shadows at Heller Gallery in New York, NY. In fall 2017, she was the Georgette and Richard Koopman Distinguished Visiting Chair in Visual Arts at Hartford Art School, joining a long line of distinguished artists and scholars. Other select exhibition venues include Arkansas Art Center, Pilchuck Gallery and the Museum of Art and Design in Tallinn, Estonia. Her work is in several public and private collections, including Corning Museum of Glass, Toledo Museum of Art, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, and Temple University.
 
MFA, Rhode Island School of Design, 1992
BA, George Washington University, 1988

 

Image: Joseph V. Labolito