With decades of experience as an artist working in academia, the non-profit sector, grassroots organizations, and the corporate world — coupled with Board memberships and organizing countless informal artist community gatherings, Sharon has accumulated a vast trove of personal and professional networks that she activates to help connect individuals and organizations throughout the country.

Informed by collaborations and conversations with gallery owners, museum professionals, critics, curators, 501 (c) (3) organizations, residencies, academics and others in different art communities, her vantage point puts her in a unique position to identify and build relationships between siloed organizations that help to assist in programming initiatives and realizing individual missions.

Sharon’s primary goal as an artist-advocate and communicator is to create opportunities and partnerships for artists and community leaders. Her passion is to bring artists front-and-center to amplify their voices. By focusing on each community’s “needs-and-wants,” she generously shares resources that will lead to sustaining creative lives.

Examples of artists assisting each other might include reaching monetary goals, securing employment, implementing new opportunities locally or in other regions, enabling greater creative growth, building upon existing relationships, generating new relationships, or simply finding forms of validation. The possibilities are endless that come about by making these synergistic connections and asking the question, “What can I do for you?”

In the end, Sharon’s consulting efforts are simply the vehicle for amplifying the voices of artists in society, which ultimately leads to the well-being of others.

EXAMPLES:

Making connections on a daily basis

Sharon’s phone and email act as a kind of “hot-line” where members of many different arts communities — individual artists, arts organizations, curators, museum directors, and more — contact her for suggestions, ideas, feedback, and introductions. She liberally gives referrals to individuals who are generous to others and devoted to contributing and making their communities better.

Online workshop series

Working with Creative Capital since 2015, these remote gatherings are designed to empower artists, demonstrate pragmatic approaches to sustaining a creative life, and grow relationships into communities. Peer-to-peer mentoring with Sharon is also a major component of these webinars, as well as with grantees who have received fellowships from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

in-person workshops

Traveling to many different types of communities, Sharon has been able to assist artists all around the country:

• Leading six day-long professional development workshops for artists across Wyoming between December 2023 and April 2024. This new program, “Investing in Wyoming’s Creative Economy,” is aimed at community building, supporting creative enterprises, and building arts-related businesses. Implemented through the University of Wyoming’s Neltje Center for Excellence in Creativity in collaboration with the Wyoming Innovation Partnership.

• Presenting at Conference of District Arts Leaders in Crested Butte, CO, covering topics such as: creating opportunities for administrators, assessing bridge-building across communities, sharing different models for sustaining creative lives. June 2023.

• Needs, Wants and Gives workshops in Sharon’s Brooklyn studio and in her galleries where artists and arts professionals gather to share details of their professional lives in order to brainstorm solutions and opportunities.

• Three hour professional practice workshop in collaboration with Creative Capital and the Dodge Foundation in South Jersey. Two dozen local artists came together in a relaxed setting moderated by Sharon to discuss needs-and-wants which facilitated new relationships. Subsequently, two of those attendees applied and were accepted into the Chautauqua Visual Arts summer residency that Sharon was directing.

• Informal gathering in Tulsa, OK, of artists from across the state (2019 & 2020) while Sharon was installing new sculpture commissions in Tulsa at the Philbrook Museum of Art and Mabrey Bank. Taking place at a local restaurant bar, the convenings followed a formal professional practice workshop at the museum for artists from across the state that was sponsored by Creative Capital.

Professional Practice Videos

interviews of artists

Amplifying ArtistS’ Voices:

To view all 34 video interviews, please visit our showcase of AMPLIFYING ARTISTS’ VOICES.

Collecting essential grass-roots data

In conjunction with her Artist as Culture Producer Conversation Tour (2017-2018), Sharon led an initiative that was partially funded by the Ford Foundation to acquire and disseminate data on artists’ practices from the front-lines of communities around the country.

Louden and collaborating artist, Jen Dalton, presented their findings in a final exhibition in 2018 entitled Validation/Permission/Opportunity in Berea, KY, as part of the ArtistThrive! summit. This treasure trove of data was culled from every question asked by audience members at each one of the 82 video-recorded panel discussions, symposia, and town-hall forums on the Book Tour. The formal & informal information, data, and statistics from this study were visualized in the exhibition and can be shared with foundations, arts organizations, academic institutions, and other think tanks which are working for the betterment of artists and the important role they play in our lives.

Fundraising & Partnerships

Sharon views building partnerships and fundraising as interrelated goals that are not mutually exclusive. Since both can only be achieved through relationship building and trust, one leads naturally to the other but both don’t necessarily involve an actual exchange of funds. There are many different types of currency that can be uncovered with a little creative ingenuity, and many organizations don’t even realize how their assets can be leveraged in unique ways.

Acting as an ambassador from the front lines of artist communities across the country, Louden has developed prosperous relationships with nonprofits, foundations, think tanks, and academic institutions:

• Louden Studio raised over $400,000 to fund two Conversation Book Tours (2013-2018). Members of our arts communities (artists, curators, gallerists, museum personnel, etc.) connected with each other in under-represented communities and were fully remunerated with financial support from many sources, including: participating institutions (164 stops on both tours), foundations (Ford Foundation, Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, Rasmuson Foundation, Cue Art, etc), individuals & companies (Kickstarter & NYFA fiscal sponsorship), as well as the National Endowment for the Arts — Art Works initiative, The Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission, and the Alaska State Council on the Arts, to name a few.

• As Artistic Director of the Chautauqua Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution, Sharon built the largest partnership program in the history of the residency, numbering more than 50 participating organizations that generated more than $125,000 in donated residency fees between 2019 - 2022. In Sharon’s first few months as Director (Fall 2018), she helped secure a $75,000 endowment for an annual Museum Director Lecture as a part of the Chautauqua Visual Arts Lecture Series, and in 2019, she received a $5,000 grant from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation to support Professional Practice programming. In 2022, Sharon was the catalyst for two initiatives that benefited the CVA Galleries. The first was a program in which she worked closely with the Director of the Galleries to sponsor exhibitions that secured over $20,000 of support for artists and exhibitions. The second opportunity was created by partnering with four institutions that shared the cost of employing four students and alumni, resulting in an additional $25,000 in savings.

Contributing to Learning Environments

Leveraging the outside-the-box creative problem solving that comes naturally to artists, Sharon has been instrumental in the success of various projects for which she has been recruited.

• Sustained the 2020 Chautauqua Visual Arts Residency online during Covid when nearly all other artist residencies across the country were suspended. Because of her many years teaching online as a visiting artist, this feat was seamless for her as she & her core faculty navigated the selection of all 40 participants in spring 2020 and then produced the 10-week residency entirely online during summer 2020.

• Implemented from scratch the first ever art library at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA). Because Sharon had worked with the Director of the Baum Gallery at UCA, Brian Young, when he was at the Arkansas Art Center in the 1990s, the natural collaboration led to identifying the need to create an art library at the UCA School of Art & Design. Activating her network in New York City, she was able to populate the new art library with contributions of over 100 important art books, kickstarting this essential resource at the school.

• Decolonized art library at Chautauqua Visual Arts (CVA). Following the success of building the art library at UCA, Sharon identified other book contributors that helped populate a smaller art library at the CVA residency once she became its Director in September 2018.

SELECTION PANELS

Since 2001, serving on panels, admissions committees, and juries across the country for nonprofits, foundations, and art institutions that select recipients of grants, residency programs, fellowships, exhibitions, and MFA programs.

For more information on Sharon’s consulting efforts and how to collaborate, please contact her Project Manager, Vinson Valega.