Shara Mays: Runaway
Artist
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Shara Mays (b. Princeville, NC) lives and works in Oakland, California and Cartagena, Colombia. She received a BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design in 2000, and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2020. In her work, Mays explores ways in which we navigate between cultural stereotype and singularity by engaging with the visual spaces between figuration and abstraction. As she mentions: “My research, although steeped with negativity, informs the outcome of my paintings, transforming a past rife with violence into a cathartic meditation on transcendence.”
Mays has exhibited her work at venues including James Cohan Gallery, New York… More
Overview
Ronchini is pleased to present an exhibition of all-new works by US-born, Colombia-based artist Shara Mays. Following the success of Flourish, the inaugural group exhibition at Ronchini, Shara Mays: Runaway marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK, presenting a new body of work made specifically for the occasion in her signature, vibrant, abstract style. Known for her expansive, gestural paintings that blur the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, Mays develops compositions that are at once intuitive and immersive, shaped through a process that prioritises movement, sensation, and openness.
Runaway takes its title from Mays’ engagement with the historical figure of the “runaway,” a term used in the archives of American slavery to describe those who fled in search of freedom. Drawing on this history, the exhibition considers movement not only as escape, but as a way of shaping one’s own path. In doing so, Mays engages with the broader histories of the African diaspora, tracing how legacies of displacement and survival continue to resonate across time. Rather than revisiting these narratives directly, Mays approaches them more indirectly, thinking through how experiences of displacement, memory, and survival continue to be felt in the present.
In her Artist Statement for Runaway, Mays writes:
“I got interested in this idea of a runaway when I started reading the digitized archive of runaway notices from old Southern newspapers in the United States. Between 1730 and 1865, an estimated 200,000 fugitive slave ads appeared in U.S. newspapers – classified notices that reduced human beings to physical descriptions, skills, and the inconvenience of their absence. Ads would describe someone as having ‘a small scar at one side of his nostrils’ or someone who ‘may endeavor to get back to his old neighborhood again.’
Maybe I am a runaway today.
I wonder where these runaways wanted to go. What heavens of emancipation, of gold-paved roads, were they hoping for? What did safe surroundings look like to them? What did they see during their sojourns of freedom?”