Sharon Wybrants

Sharon Wybrants (born 1943 in Miami Beach, Florida) is an American painter, performance artist, and educator.

Education and early career Wybrants earned an AFA at Sullins College (1961–63), a BFA at Ohio Wesleyan University (1963–65), and an MA in Painting, Fine Art at Hunter College (1972–74). In 1973, using the married name Sharon Wybrants-Lynch, she was a founding artist-member of SOHO20 Gallery, the second all-women cooperative exhibition space in New York City. She remained with the gallery until 1978. She exhibited paintings and drawings of "vigorous, creative women whose faces defy any judgment based on culturally-defined standards of feminine beauty," including an expressive self-portrait called Revolutionary Woman (1973), For her second solo exhibition at SOHO20, Wybrants showed painted "images of exaggerated feminine sensibility," Wybrants also exhibited in group shows, including The Eye of Woman (1974, Hobart and William Smith Colleges) and Year of the Woman (1975, Bronx Museum of the Arts). Also on view was another pastel, Wybrants's Self-Portrait in Superwoman Costume with Rauschenberg in the Background (1975), but it was also intended to communicate something of the uncertainty and personal suffering behind the groundbreaking accomplishments of the feminist art movement. Wybrants recreated the painting for a new exhibition of The Sister Chapel at Rowan University Art Gallery in 2016.

In 1976, the pastel version of Self-Portrait as Superwoman was used as the image on a poster to promote an Equal Rights Amendment Work Conference sponsored by the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women. The pastel version was also exhibited a second time at SOHO20 in Superwoman, Beauty and the Beast, Wybrants's third solo show at the gallery. each reflecting "a different mood and a different way of seeing herself," as noted by the art critic Ellen Lubell. The paintings ranged from During the Separation (1976), which Marjorie Kramer likened to "a wild animal looking for possible dangers," to Cathartic Conversation with Al Hansen (1976), which is looser and far less constrained. The Feminist Art Journal,

Performance art Between 1978 and 1980, Wybrants created a number of performances in addition to working as a painter. Master Lady and Her Four Master Pieces (1980), for example, featured Wybrants being dragged around a stage by a group of young men on leashes who were wearing bondage-type costumes.

Later career While living in Woodstock, New York between 1981 and 1984, Wybrants hosted a weekly cable television talk show called "Fire, It's a Verb." In 1990, Wybrants was the founding director of Challenged Artists Together, a non-profit art organization for children, adolescents, and adults with disabilities in Las Cruces, New Mexico. In 2010, Wybrants was awarded an artist residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts.