About

Shannon Rae Fincke (b. 1974, Pennsylvania, United States) is a Los Angeles-based artist who creates paintings on wood, clay, canvas and yupo paper. Her work explores ephemerality, interconnectivity, memories, emotions and psychology, and are influenced by motherhood and interpersonal and ancestral trauma. Shannon focuses on the alchemy of mixed water-based media and how it interacts with various substrates. She concentrates on control and intentionality verses the organic nature of the media. Her intimate and colorful figurative and landscape paintings range widely in scale and push the limits of materiality, surface, and abstraction. 

Shannon’s work is in private and public collections throughout the U.S., has been exhibited in solo and group shows at museums and galleries internationally, and has been featured in print, film, and television. Her work has been shown in LA at Brand Library and Art Center and Angeles Gate Cultural Center, Spilt Milk Gallery in the U.K., BHA Gallery in Canada, Women United Art Movement Gallery in Czech Republic, among others. Shannon is the recipient of a DAWA residency, and press includes Voyage LA Magazine, Shoutout LA, Painting Our World, Women United Art Magazine, Art Mums United Podcast, and Vvrkshop Art, and more.  

Shannon attended the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts in high school, completed her undergraduate degree in Studio Art at Washington & Jefferson College and Susquehanna University, both in Pennsylvania, and The Marchutz School of Fine Arts in France, and earned her master’s in painting and art education with high honors at New York University, where she was the recipient of a Gallatin Dean’s Graduate Scholarship and studied intensively with Arnold Mesches.

Shannon is also an established art educator and curator. She has instructed art for over twenty five years in a wide variety of capacities, and in 2011 founded the Institute for Visual Arts (IVA) in Los Angeles, where she currently serves as Director. In addition to curating exhibitions for IVA, in 2023 Shannon started an artist-run gallery in Los Angeles called The Middle Room. Formerly of New York City, she has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 2002, where she currently resides with her husband and three daughters.