Sherry Owens and Art Shirer’s collaborative sculpture for TRUE NORTH 2020 is created from discarded cuttings of the sinewy crape myrtle which are beautifully sculpted together with hardware and then carbon finished. Owens and Shirer say that Carbon Sink “is a visual metaphor of an organic storage place for the carbon dioxide present in our atmosphere [and] . . . this sculpture represents a depository for the greenhouse gases that affect our environment.”
Owens was born in Mt. Vernon, Texas, and received her BFA from Southern Methodist University. She has exhibited throughout the US, internationally in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, India, Peru and Turkey and in 2018 was included in Commanding Space: Women Sculptors of Texas at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth.
Shirer was born in Cincinnati and received his BFA from East Carolina University and M.F.A. from Louisiana Tech University. Of his many awards, Shirer received the top prize in the North Carolina Sculpture ’79 exhibition as well as an Artist Fellowship from the State of Louisiana Division of the Arts.
Together they have merged their aesthetic sensibilities on over twenty projects spanning three decades. Among their many exhibitions together, some of their more recent site-specific collaborations were “Art on the River,” Port Jefferson History & Nature Center, Jefferson, Texas, and “entangled” UMLAUF Sculpture Garden & Museum in Austin. They each maintain their busy studios in Dallas.
Thank you, Sherry and Art, and all the 2020 artists! We can’t believe these sculptures will go back to their homes in just a couple of months—they’ve become such a big part of our lives. All sculptures are for sale, and TRUE NORTH artists have generously agreed to donate 20% of any sales back to the project’s designated fund for future exhibitions.
The TRUE NORTH team and the Houston Heights Association would like thank our community- and arts-minded TRUE NORTH 2020 Underwriters—it cannot happen without your support. Fundraising is now underway to support the 2021 exhibition. Please visit our website for those benefits and more information on the project—TRUE NORTH WEBSITE. We may be reached at boulevardart@houstonheights.org if you have any questions at all.