Sharita Towne

B. 1984 Salem, Oregon

Lives and works in Portland, Oregon

Sharita Towne works collaboratively in research, education, print media, video, and socially engaged art projects. She has pursued work at concentration camp memorials in Germany, at Saharawi Refugee camps in Algeria, in Brazil, Chile, Spain, Palestine, and in gentrifying cities like Portland, Oregon. Her work takes place in museums, schools, print shops, community centers, neighborhoods, and within her own family. Towne works within the collective URe:AD Press (United Re:Public of the African Diaspora) and the postcolonial conceptual karaoke band Weird Allan Kaprow. She currently teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art and is a 2015 Art Matters Grantee.

For Converge 45, Towne has collaborated with a group of artists, activists, and urban studies professors on the project, This is a Black Spatial Imaginary, which brings together interdisciplinary installations, print media, and public interventions that explore new forms of practice at the intersection of art, urban planning, historical record, transmedia collaboration and creative exchange.

Organized by Center for Contemporary Art & Culture and curated by Mack McFarland, co-presented with Converge 45, PCC Paragon Gallery, and in situ PORTLAND, a program of the Regional Arts & Culture Council, with additional support from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, Precipice Fund, Calligram Foundation, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.