Sharon Hayes is an artist who uses video, performance, sound, and public sculpture to expose specific intersections between history, politics, and speech. Hayes is invested in unspooling reductive historical narratives to reignite dormant pathways through which counter-understandings of the contemporary political condition can be formed. In her work, she lingers in the grammars—linguistic, affective, and sonic—through which political resistance appears.

Her practice is in conversation—and acts in collective force and resonance with—the heterogeneous field of actions, voices, and practices that resist normative behaviors, complicit and unjust social agreements, and proscriptive temporalities to open up new ways of being together in the world. Her work sustains a distinct and vital commitment to performance and collaboration and is devoted to the radical possibilities of nonnormative occupation of public space and holding public space as a site for unpredictable and unregulated encounters.

She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York (2014), Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin (2013), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2012), and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2012). Her work has also been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2013) and at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in New York and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She is the recipient of many awards and grants, including a Pew Fellowship (2016), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), the Alpert Award in Visual Arts (2013), an Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2013), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (2007). Hayes currently teaches at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.