solo show

Torn Up
Chandran Gallery
2025

from Chandran Gallery’s Press Release:

Shara Mays — TORN UP Chandran Gallery October 10 – December 30, 2025 Chandran Gallery is pleased to present TORN UP, the second solo exhibition by Shara Mays with the gallery, following her 2022 debut. At the center of the exhibition is a suspended textile sculpture composed of painted strips of canvas and drop cloth. Expanding her practice from the painted surface into sculptural form, Mays transforms the gallery’s central space into a composition of color, movement, and scale. Surrounding paintings create a dialogue between surface and structure, two- and three-dimensional form, and the porous boundaries between memory and material. Rooted in autobiography, the exhibition honors Mays’s grandfather, a house painter in Princeville, North Carolina, whose labor in the segregated South anchored her family for decades. In Mays’s hands, the necessity of his painting becomes possibility: expansive, suspended, and alive with color. Mays draws connections between the cypress trees of her childhood in North Carolina and the mangrove and banyan trees that surround her home in Cartagena, Colombia. Their visible, intertwined roots echo the layered gestures of her brushwork and become metaphors for inheritance, belonging, and the shared histories of the African diaspora. Titles drawn from slave manifests extend these reflections as acts of remembrance and reclamation. TORN UP is part of Mays’s ongoing Wonderment / Burden series, which explores how memory, labor, and landscape converge. Together, the works position painting as both personal archive and collective narrative, rooted in the past yet reaching outward toward connection and possibility.

Exhibition Details TORN UP will be on view at Chandran Gallery, San Francisco, from October 10 through December 30, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Friday, October 10, from 6–8pm.