About the Artist

Shelley Gilchrist is a transplanted Californian who has been creating art in the Chicago area since 1995. For several years she worked in oil and gouache, and linked her figurative pieces thematically to the feminist narrative. In 2006, her work turned toward abstraction when she began to shape her painting surfaces and use curvilinear motifs and saturated colors in her designs. Her current series of sculptural paintings are geometric, created on shaped PVC constructions.

She has received awards in the Midwest and East Coast; recently her work was featured in the national show Organic to Geometric II at Provincetown Museum and the international Annual Juried Exhibition at Monmouth Museum in New Jersey. Her sculptural drawings, created by turning paper on its edge, have earned top awards at the Rockford Midwest Biennial and the South Shore Arts Salon Show.

Shelley has juried shows at Woman Made Gallery and ARC Gallery in Chicago. She is a member of Chicago Sculpture International and the founder of FUSEDChicago, a professional group of Midwest artists who use encaustic. She had artist residencies at Ragdale and was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Publications that include her work are Studio Visit (annually) and Encaustic Art in the Twenty-First Century, E. Ashley Rooney, ed.