Shelley Lowell is a painter and sculptor residing in Danbury, CT where she has her studio. She was born in the Bronx, NY in 1946 and started drawing at an early age. She studied Advertising Design & Visual Communications at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY graduating with a BFA. Since then, she has maintained a high level of creativity with parallel artistic careers as both a visual artist and a visual communicator. Her commercial work won awards in the design of books, sales literature, stationery, newsletters, print ads, menus, and typography as well as illustration. Her work has been published in over a dozen books.

She began writing poetry in the early 1970s. Her poetry has been published in books and online. She performs her poems at poetry events and her gallery opening receptions. Her art and poetry are her way to communicate her inner-self and her reactions to her surroundings. Her artistic ability was developed over the last 30+ years expressed as contemporary artwork with an edge, a statement and a message.

In the beginning of her artistic career (1970s), her art earned her the label of a NYC Feminist representational and social commentary visual artist as she produced monumental original artwork and poetry as a counter statement to what she felt as demeaning aspects of the sexual revolution of the period. This work is represented in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Feminist Art Base on the Brooklyn Museum web site. It has been in museum and gallery exhibits and published in feminist art journals and publications. Biographical information and image of one of her paintings was published in Women Artists of America II.

Ms. Lowell continued her figurative fine art quest while maintaining a successful advertising agency first in NYC (1974-77), later in Atlanta, GA (1977-96). Shortly after moving to Asheville, NC (1996), where she owned a gallery and curated the exhibitions, her artworks changed into a non-representational, abstracted style, which continued through 2003. These paintings, which, seemed like abstract works, were, in fact, visions and spiritual concepts, which she felt compelled to paint.

In her current paintings and their inspired poetry, she uses metaphor such as her stylized tree as a symbol of humanity or a symbol of the world humanity inhabits, creating the duality of the seen and the unseen, metaphorically and in reality. Both convey a message through its subject, scale and its under laid composition and atmosphere.

Shelley’s first solo show of her current work was in a Baltimore, MD gallery (2005) where she received a favorable review in the Baltimore Sun. Her work has been in solo, two-person and group shows in New York City, Washington, DC area, Atlanta, GA and New England area. Her work is in corporate collections including Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (NYC), Cultural Arts Council of Douglasville (GA) and the Dr. Pepper Company (TX), and private collections as well. She is in the Clara database and the Archive Library of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC) and WAAND, the feminist women’s artist art base at Rutgers University as well as the Elizabeth A. Sackler Feminist Art Base/Brooklyn Museum web site.

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