Shane Charles

Shane Charles (b. 1983, Maine, USA) creates paintings, sculptures and photographs within a process of abstraction and poetics. Petroglyphs, mythology and natural cycles all inform his work. Charles utilizes raw and sourced material, body prints and open compositional spaces, to engage with themes of artifact, presence and continuity. Charles is a direct descendent of the Penobscot Nation and is also of (colonial) British ancestry. His grandfather was a mapmaker and his father was the Penobscot tribal surveyor after the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980. From this lineage, Charles’ narrative, which includes generational fracture and psychogeography, is one of place and remembrance. His making is a meditation on iconography and assemblage, while dichotomies play out of the intimate and monumental, the architectural and performative. Charles’ recent works deal with memory, generational loss and renewal.

Charles has received significant support through commissions, collections, or solo exhibitions by museums and contemporary art institutions, including NARS Foundation, NYC (solo, 2022); Space Gallery, Portland, ME, with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation (solo, 2022) and Re-Site public art (2020); the Goethe-Institut Boston (solo, 2021); the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (2020); the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2019); Wassaic Project (2019); I-Park Foundation (2019); the School of Visual Arts, NYC (2018); the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D (solo, 2015); the Ackland Art Museum and a commission for the permanent collection at the UNC Alumni Sculpture Garden (2015); among others. He is currently exhibiting work in a three-person show at Yi Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) and the 2023 CMCA Biennial (Rockland, ME). Shane Charles is also the recipient of the inaugural 2022 CMCA Artist Residency in collaboration with the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, which will culminate in a public art installation this April. Charles received his Master of Fine Arts degree from UNC at Chapel Hill, where he focused on sculpture and performance. Previously he studied painting at the University of Maine through the indigenous Wabanaki program. 

You can connect with Shane here:
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