Sharon Lockhart

Sharon Lockhart was born in Norwood, Massachusetts, in 1964 and lives and works in Los Angeles. She received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991 and an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena in 1993. Working primarily with photography and film, she has developed a research-based practice that brings ethnographic observation into dialogue with formal composition. Lockhart is currently a faculty member in the Photography and Media programme at the California Institute of the Arts. Her work frequently examines the "staged" reality of labour, education, movement, and communal life. Lockhart gained international recognition for her ability to combine cinematic duration with the formal qualities of still photography. In 2017, she represented Poland at the 57th Venice Biennale with Little Review, a multidisciplinary project developed through her long-term collaboration with girls and young women from the Youth Center for Sociotherapy in Rudzienko. The project took its title from Mały Przegląd (Little Review), a Polish newspaper supplement founded by the educator and children’s-rights advocate Janusz Korczak and written and edited by children. Through film, photography, and installation, Lockhart examines the history and representation of labour as well as the seemingly mundane gestures of everyday life, using long takes and static camera positions to foreground the "choreography of the everyday." Throughout her career, Lockhart has developed a methodology of "long-term engagement," often spending extended periods building relationships with specific individuals and communities. Her subjects and collaborators have included workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard in Maine, schoolgirls and athletes in Japan, and children and young women in Poland. This sustained approach allows her to investigate the "politics of the gaze" and the ethics of representation, positioning the camera as a collaborative instrument rather than a detached observer. Her works occupy the "intermediate zones" between documentary observation and carefully constructed artifice, while her installations frequently incorporate architectural elements, publications, and archival materials that broaden the social and historical contexts of the images. Lockhart has presented major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, and Kunstmuseum Luzern. Her work has appeared in several Whitney Biennials and in international exhibitions including the Liverpool and Shanghai biennials. It is held in prominent public collections, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and LACMA. Lockhart’s work is recognised for its formal rigour and sustained attention to subjects and activities frequently considered "unremarkable." Through photography and film, she continues to examine how time, labour, movement, and community shape individual and collective experience.