Shawne Major

Shawne Major presents assemblage works that are a scandalous carnival of visual and tactile pleasure. After earning her MFA in sculpture at Rutgers and living in New York in the 90's, Major returned to Louisiana where she grew up, and began making magical compositions of found objects that are about connections to ritual, fetish, and the handmade object.

Acclaimed for their physical and emotional impact, and their eloquence in describing the struggle with chaos, Major's works are a result of her re-enchantment of the materials from disposable production, and about answering the volumes of discarded consumerist objects with a personal levee against the flow.

Shawne Major, born in New Iberia in 1968, resides in Opelousas. She received her BFA from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette and her MFA from Rutgers University, then lived in New York in the '90s. After beginning her career as a painter, Major turned to the found object assemblage "tapestries" she has been producing for over 15 years. Upon her return to Louisiana, she was selected along with 85 international artists to exhibit her post-pop, found-object assemblage works in the Prospect.1 New Orleans Biennial held in 2008. She has received grant awards from the the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others. Her work is in the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Renwick Collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, the Paul and Lulu Hilliard Museum of Art, Lafayette, Francis Greenberger Collection, New York, and the Frederick Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include the Chicago Cultural Center, the Hilliard Museum of Art in Lafayette, LA, Moreau Art Gallery of St. Mary's College, Notre Dame. The bibliography of her work is extensive and includes reviews and articles in Artforum, Art in America, Art News, Fiber Arts, Surface Design, Art Papers and the Huffington Post