Sharon Hayes

Sharon Hayes is an artist who uses video, performance, sound and public sculpture to expose specific intersections between history, politics and speech, to unspool reductive historical narratives and to re-ignite dormant pathways through which counter-understandings of the contemporary political condition can be formed. In her work, she lingers in the grammars–linguistic, affective and sonic–through which political resistance appears. Hayes’ practice is in conversation and acts in collective force and resonance with the heterogeneous field of actions, voices and practices that resist normative behaviors, complicit and unjust social agreements and proscriptive temporalities to open up new ways of being together in the world. Her work sustains a distinct and vital commitment to perfor­mance and to collaboration and is devoted to the radical possibilities of non-normative occupation of public space and in holding public space as a site for unpredictable and unregulated encounters. Her most recent work Ricerche: four, a two-channel video installation composed of footage from three group interviews with LGBTQIA elders in Philadelphia, Dowelltown, Tennessee and Los Angeles, was exhibited in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. In addition, Hayes has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at n.b.k. (Neue Berliner Kunstverein) in Berlin, Germany (2022), Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden (2019), Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York (2014), the Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin (2013), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2012), and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid (2012). Her work has also been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial (2024), Venice Biennale (2013), the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She is the recipient of many awards and grants, including a Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Award (2024), American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grants to Artist Award-Foundation for Contemporary Art (2024), US Artists Fellowship (2021), Pew Fellowship (2016), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), the Alpert Award in Visual Arts (2013), an Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2013), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (2007). She has been teaching in the Department of Fine Arts, Weitzman School of Design since 2015.