Sherry Owens b. 1950 — Sherry Owens has been creating in Dallas for over 40 years. From a young age, Owens has been an artist, even making her own clothes and clothes for her dolls. As a professional artist, she was first interested in weaving — as she dyed the yarn and created these large, woven works. Eventually, Owens found interest in welding, but had to stop because of the physical demands. This act made her turn to her new medium, the crepe myrtle. The medium references her past, where she spent summers at her grandfather’s ranch, exposed to nature.

Owens’ process begins with a sketchbook — an important step to the artist. Owens then continues by collecting discarded trees, whittling, carving, waxing, painting, dyeing, and burnishing the branches before she assembles them with pegs, baling wire, and other material choices. Owens’ studio is full of crepe myrtle branches—as she initially took in any trimmings she can get. Now, after years of a successful practice, the artist is more selective in what trimmings she accepts. Her studio becomes a type of forest itself, as limbs line the walls and sprout from the rafters. She carefully selects each branch, noting the knots and movement of each branch in her studio. Sometimes, her selection process can take hours to find the perfect branch. The narrative of each sculpture is decided well in advance of its assembly; the subsequent choice of each stick, each gesture, and each connecting point resembles the marks of drawing in the third dimension.

Owens works are not simply beautiful sculptures, but they all have deep references to the environment the crepe myrtles grow in. Using her own sculptural technique, color, and naming of the works, Owens references deforestation, intense heat, sustainability, and more. Owens has worked with this medium for so long, that she knows its movement intimately, as she uses the crepe myrtles to reference ideas and issues outside her studio.

Sherry Owens lives and works in Dallas, TX and received a BFA from Southern Methodist University. Her work has been shown throughout Texas and the southwest; in 2020 she mounted a solo exhibition, Promise Me the Earth at The Grace Museum in Abilene, Texas. In 2018, she completed a two-person site specific installation at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum in Austin, Texas, and was included in Commanding Space: Women Sculptors of Texas, at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2017, Owens mounted a solo exhibition at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, and the Martin Museum of Art at Baylor University. Owens has exhibited internationally in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, India, Peru, Turkey, and was recently included in The First Crosscurrent Yokohama-Texas International Artists Exchange Show 2019 at Kanagawa Prefectural Gallery in Yokohama, Japan.  

Sherry Owens has completed several large public art projects, including a monumental bronze through the Love Field Modernization Program at Love Field Airport in Dallas, TX and a large-scale commission for the Ben E. Keith Company, also in Dallas. Owens is a former president of the Texas Sculpture Association, has served on various art boards and was a co-founder of the Emergency Artists’ Support League. She was the recipient of the Moss/Chumley North Texas Artist Award in 1999, was the West Texas Triangle artist in 2010 with a comprehensive survey at five west Texas museums, and received the Artist/Craftsman Award from the AIA Dallas in 2014. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA; San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts in San Angelo, TX and The Grace Museum in Abilene, TX.