Spark Artist

Socially engaged art, multidisciplinary art & printmaking

Sharita Towne is a multidisciplinary artist and arts worker based in Portland, OR, born and raised on the West Coast of the U.S. along Interstate 5, from Salem, OR to Tacoma, WA and down to Sacramento, CA. She is most interested in engaging local and global Black geographies, histories, and possibilities. In her work, a shared art penetrates and binds people—artists, audience, organizers, civic structures, sisters, cousins, and landscape—in collective catharsis, grief, and joy. Towne is the founder of nůn studios, a risograph and publication studio located in Northeast Portland, Oregon, that functions not only as a workspace but as a center where art converges with counter-hegemony. The studio offers free and highly subsidized printing services for organizers, writers, and artists who work in local to global solidarity movements, community wellness, and independent publishing, among other schemes and dreams. Towne is also the creator of the program "a Black Art Ecology of Portland" (BAEP)—a transdisciplinary convener and resource mobilizer cultivating networks of creative care between partner organizations, land stewards, and arts workers. BAEP supports the creation of art in new and existing art spaces, affordable housing, and site-responsive public art, imbuing the greater Portland/Oregon landscape with Black healing, justice, and belonging. Towne holds a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Portland State University. Her work has received support from organizations including Creative Capital, the Fulbright Association, Art Matters, The Ford Family Foundation, Justice Oregon for Black Lives at the Meyer Memorial Trust, Oregon Community Foundation, Oregon Humanities, Oregon Arts Commission, the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, the MRG Lilla Jewel Award, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Open Signal, SPACES in Cleveland, and the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, OR.