Artist Statement

As a child, the best part of playing Hopscotch for me was the first white chalk line that I set down on the asphalt in front of my home. The game has been with us for three hundred years, its name derives from two activities, to hop which everyone knows means to jump, and to scotch, which means to cut or scratch a line in the dirt. That line has followed me throughout my life as a painter. I am always, in one way or another, scratching lines in the dirt, whether making marks on canvas, burlap, linen, clay or in the earth itself. My painted lines are conduits of connection both from past to present and across geographic spaces: they are passages, threads, trails, footprints. As with hopscotch there is a journey out and a return journey where the numbers are upside down and messages are scrambled. The squares contain the story like the edges of a canvas but sometimes the line is blurred, the flung stone misses its mark, breaks free from the borders drawn to contain it, as if to call into question the legitimacy of borders themselves by revealing their arbitrary nature. In my paintings, fabric, color and shape express a desire for unbounded harmony, but desire is always caught by the tail, the lines must be drawn.

Artist Bio

Sharon Kaitz is a Boston based artist. Her work has been shown internationally in the UK, Japan, Italy, Germany and Ukraine and nationally in Boston, New York, and Houston. 

Numerous Boston galleries and Massachusetts museums have featured her work including Harcus Gallery, Allston Skirt Gallery, Gallery Mourlot, Beth Urdang Gallery, Clark Gallery, The Fuller Art Museum, The Berkshire Museum, the ICA Boston, the Rose Art Museum and most recently at Suffolk University in The Long View. She is a member of Kingston Gallery and has shown both drawings and paintings there.  

Her paintings are in the permanent collection of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, corporate collections including those of General Cinema, Fidelity, Harcourt and Bank of America, and many private collections. Her exhibitions and designs have been reviewed in ArtNews, Art New England, House and Garden, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, New England Homes, The New York Times, and New American Paintings among other publications.

She designed and executed the set for David Mamet's play Boston Marriage. She has also collaborated with Mr. Mamet on film work, providing art for his movie OLEANNA. The designer Rei Kawakabo commissioned her artwork to stand with her clothing designs in the flagship Tokyo store of Commes des Garcons.

She received her MFA from Pratt Institute in 1975.