Shari Mendelson is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn and upstate New York. She looks to art history for inspiration for her work — especially ancient Greek, Roman, and Islamic glass and ceramic objects. With equal parts reverence and play, she reinterprets these ancient works using recycled plastic bottles. Conceptually her interest is in the dialogue between the rare, ancient works we value in museums and our contemporary throw-away plastic culture. Formally, her interest is in the exploration of structure, scale, color, opacity and translucency.

Mendelson lives and works in Brooklyn and upstate New York. She has been the recipient of a John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2017), four New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (1987, 1997, 2011, 2017), and a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (1989). She has participated in residencies including Yaddo (2018, 1990), The MacDowell Colony (2018), the Bau Institute/Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France (2014), UrbanGlass (2014), Corning Museum of Glass (2015), and The Toledo Museum of Art GAPP residency (2017).

She has had solo exhibitions at UrbanGlass, Pierogi, Black + Herron Space, and Todd Merrill Studio; NYC, and John Davis Gallery; Hudson, NY. She has participated in numerous two-person shows including a 2017 show at The John Molloy Gallery, NYC, and has been included in gallery and museum exhibitions including The Aldrich Museum, and The Brooklyn Museum. Her work is in the permanent collection of The RISD Museum, Providence, RI, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, The Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, Australia. Mendelson's work has been featured in publications including in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Modern Magazine, Ceramics Now, Glass Quarterly, and NY Arts.

Deer Askos, Repurposed plastic, hot glue, resin, acrylic polymer, paint, mica, 8x7x3, 2018, photo by Alan Wiener

Glasslike installation at UrbanGlass Brooklyn 2018 photo by Nils d'Aulaire