"James Farm"
Watercolor on Paper

Sharon Yates Biography
Sharon Yates was born in Rochester, New York. She received a BFA from Syracuse University and spent a semester in Florence, Italy as part of the university program. In 1966, she received an MFA from Tulane University and has taught painting and drawing since then, including appointments at the University of Louisville, the University of Maine and at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. as the Smith Distinguished visiting artist. She has lectured on her work at several colleges and universities in the USA and abroad including the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, the S.A.C.I. program in Florence, Italy and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. Yates is on the faculty of the Maryland Institute College of Art since 1968 where she received a MICA Trustees Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1994. She has primarily taught courses that center on figurative painting. Soon after establishing a home and studio in Maine in 1987, she developed MICA's study abroad summer program to Canada and continues to serve as its director. Presently, she divides her time between Maine and Baltimore, Maryland.

Yates has a long experience of painting landscapes in diverse locations in the United States, France and Italy. Her paintings have won her several honors and awards throughout her career including the Prix de Rome; a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant and the Shatalov Award at the National Academy of Design in New York City where she is an academician member. Her work is published in two books by Alan Gussow, A Sense of Place, The Artist and the American Land and Artist as Native: Reinventing Regionalism and in The Virginia Landscape by J.C. Kelly & William Rasmussen. Her paintings are in several public collections such as the University of Louisville, University of Alberta, Lucent Technologies, National Academy of Design, Oklahoma Art Museum, United Technologies, Bates College Museum of Art, University of Maine at Machias and the Tides Institute in Maine.

Her paintings have been seen in solo exhibitions at Fischbach Gallery in New York City, Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, University of Maine Machias Art Galleries, Sunbury Shores Art and Nature Center in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada, Turtle Gallery in Deer Isle, Maine and in 2005 at the Pinkard Gallery, Bunting Center, MICA. Recently, her work has been included in several group shows in Maine at the L.C. Bates Museum, Colby College Museum of Art, Bates College Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art, Turtle Gallery and the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor.

Her work expresses her passion for painting outdoors and in recent years the agricultural landscape has become her focus; particularly, the cattle and dairy farms in Maine. She states: "The ever-changing light, weather and animals interacting with the land is what I find most compelling and challenging. I watch the cows roam the fields, woods, and barnyards sometimes for hours, waiting for them to slow down or settle at rest; always a gamble. Constant movement-slight or dramatic, keeps me on the edge.