Jean Sbarra Jones creates poetry in her luminous acrylic paintings of dresses floating in bodies of water. She lives in the North Shore of Massachusetts where she has spent many days on a boat with her husband casting a fishing line attached to a vintage dress. The dresses have travelled from Massachusetts to Aruba, inspiring a body of work rich in narrative and hauntingly beautiful.
Jean is an award-winning artist, holding a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from Boston University College of Art. She has exhibited widely, received grants for residencies and been published most recently in AcrylicWorks5 and Studio Visit Magazine. She currently teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her work has been selected to be included in exhibitions by numerous leaders in the art world such as Alan Weinberg, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Clifford Ackley, curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Jean's paintings have also been juried and chosen by well-known artists such as William Bailey, Judy Chicago, Faith Ringgold and Donald Sultan. Her work is included in many private collections, including the estate of the late Kenneth Noland, a well-known 1960’s color field painter. Jean speaks publicly about her work in relationship to her personal life experiences and faith, which illuminates more thoroughly the unique and powerful meaning embedded in her paintings.
