Shawn Marshall
Louisville, KY
Shawn Marshall is a contemporary painter and mixed media artist based in Louisville, Kentucky.
Message
Shawn Marshall is a Kentucky-based mixed media artist with a background in architecture and design. She earned a Master of Architecture with a Minor in Fine Art from Cornell University, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Kentucky. She is also a visual arts educator who earned Master of Art in Teaching from Bellarmine University.
Shawn Marshall's work has garnered both national and international recognition, with features in Curatory Art Magazine, Visionary Art Magazine, Create! Magazinee, Suboart Magazine, Contemporary Collage Magazine, and others. In the summers of 2024 and 2025, she completed residencies with the Jen Tough Gallery in Santa Fe, which culminated in a solo exhibition in November of 2024. She also exhibited with the Jen Tough Gallery at the 2026 LA Art Show in January. Marshall has also received multiple Artist Enrichment Grants from the Great Meadows Foundation, the most recent of which supported her travels to Venice, Italy, to attend the 2024 Biennale.
Shawn Marshall’s work is included in many collections including the S.N.A.P. Collection in Louisville, KY, and corporate collections including Brown-Forman Corporation, PNC Bank, Commonwealth Bank, and the University of Kentucky. Her work can also be found in numerous private collections in the U.S. and Europe. She is represented by Wheelhouse Gallery in Louisville, KY & Lexington, KY and also by Hammond Harkins Galleries in Columbus, OH.
Statement
My work examines how femininity is constructed through architecture, material culture, and systems of power and display. Informed by my background in architecture, I approach collage as a form of spatial assembly, building layered environments that function as thresholds, vitrines, and compressed sites of desire. Through hand-cut vintage ephemera, florals, figures, and found objects, built up through alternating layers of resin, I construct worlds that are seductive on the surface and structurally unstable underneath. The work is surreal in its logic: scale collapses, spaces contradict themselves, and beauty operates as both invitation and trap.
Across my practice, I am interested in how gendered identities are rehearsed and how figures are positioned within spaces saturated with power they have been trained not to see. Some works approach this through the architectural, with figures dwarfed by or absorbed into institutional interiors, the body negotiating spaces that were not built for her. Others use the language of the floral still life, embedding fragments of material culture within a classic vanitas framework to expose the ingrained misogyny and commercial contradictions hidden in plain sight. In all of it, the resin is not a finish. It is a structural element, building depth, sealing evidence, and transforming the ordinary into something that must be looked at slowly.
I am drawn to the moment when aesthetic pleasure tips into interrogation, when a surface that initially reads as ornamental reveals itself as a compressed anatomy of consumerism, desire, and constraint. My work asks the viewer to keep looking.