Shelby Head
Providence, RI
My interdisciplinary practice investigates the social and linguistic constructs that shape identity, history, and collective memory in the United States.
Message
Shelby Head (pronouns: fluid) is known for integrating urgent social narratives into an ever-evolving visual language. Their multidisciplinary approach combines material experimentation with a commitment to expanding political and cultural critique.
Head’s work includes public art, gallery exhibitions, alternative spaces, and art fairs. They have received numerous awards, residencies, and fellowships, such as the Tulsa Artist Fellowship Integrated Arts Award (2022–23), Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2020–22), THRIVE Powerhouse Grant with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2022), and several OVAC Grants (2020–22). Other honors include the Connecticut Artist Fellowship Grant (2019), SLV Social Practice Residency with the National Endowment for the Arts (2019), Artist’s Resource Trust Grant (2017), Vermont Studio Center Residency (2019), and Jentel Residency (2018).
Recent exhibitions include Dirt Palace Storefront Window Gallery, Providence, RI (2024); Living Arts of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK (2023); Melton Gallery, University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, OK (2022); Window Front Installation, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Tulsa, OK (2021); El Pueblo History Museum, Pueblo, CO (2020); and Cloyde Snook Gallery, Alamosa, CO (2020).
Statement
My art practice examines how social and linguistic constructs shape identity in the United States. Rooted in inquiry and collaboration, my work creates participatory spaces for testimony, fact-finding, and collective dialogue. Through interdisciplinary methods, I invite diverse communities to uncover overlooked histories and confront the enduring consequences of European colonization. By sifting through the debris of history, we can interrogate the legacies of race, class, and gender—opening pathways toward decolonizing the mind, reclaiming collective memory, and imagining transformative futures.
Making is, for me, a way of listening—across time, place, and difference. This approach shaped Beyond the Whitewash (2023) at Living Arts of Tulsa, located on the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and the ancestral lands of the Osage, Cherokee, and Muscogee peoples. Over the course of a year, Black, Native, and white artists engaged in shared leadership, deep listening, and creative exchange around race in the United States. Together, we transformed the gallery into a space of remembrance, truth-telling, and healing through visual art, sound, installation, poetry, and performance.
Similarly, Am I That Name? explores Queerness as a generative and life-affirming way of being, challenging binary gender frameworks through sculpture, works on paper, sound, video, and performance. Shown at the Melton Gallery (2022), it culminated in a dance performance led by University of Central Oklahoma students, using movement as a language of transformation.
Across my work, I aim to dismantle harmful narratives by emphasizing the fluidity and diversity of human experience.
I live and create on the ancestral lands of the Pokanoket, Narragansett, and Wampanoag Peoples. I acknowledge the long and violent legacy of my forebears in the colonization of this land and accept the responsibility to confront that history—its occupation, its enduring harm, and its ongoing impact on Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.