Sharon Patten

January 26 - February 9, 2002 Free Admission

Sharon was born in Sedalia, Missouri in 1943. She received her B.A. in German from the University of Kansas in 1965. Moving from Sedalia to Kansas City in 1975, she began attending the Kansas City Art Institute full-time and received her B.F.A. in 1979. She attended graduate school at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia for a short time, but chose to leave school and move to New York City in 1980. Sharon moved back to Kansas City after a year in New York. In 1988 Sharon received the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. It was in 1988 that she showed her mature work in a group exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center in Kansas City.

Throughout the early 1990s her work received wider recognition in both Kansas City and in New York. She exhibited her work at Gallery V, the Morgan Gallery and at the Leedy Voulkos Gallery in Kansas City and the Moran Gallery in Sedalia. In June 1995 Sharon received national attention when her work was highlighted in Art in America. Following a brief illness Sharon died in December 1995 at the age of 52.