About

ABOUT SERENA COLE

Serena Cole received her Master of Fine Arts degree in 2011 from the California College of the Arts. She has exhibited her work nationally in solo exhibitions such as Gallery 16, San Francisco, Soo Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis, and Stephanie Chefas Projects, Portland, and group exhibitions such as “Twisted Sisters” at Dodge Gallery, New York, “Oakland East Side Story” at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, and “Watercolors” at Phillips de Pury, New York. Her work has been written about in The Huffington Post, Juxtapoz Magazine, KQED Arts, Comstock’s Magazine, and more. After living in the Bay Area for over fifteen years, she moved to Sacramento, CA. Serena is a resident in the Studio Project at Verge Center for the Arts. She is an adjunct professor at Sierra College and American River College.

Her work continues a dialog found throughout the history of art connecting portraiture, beauty, desire, and the representation of human subjects. Her artworks embody and reclaim archetypes and tropes of female figures, seeking to remove the hierarchical experience of the traditional gaze of the viewer onto a passive subject. Appropriated from anonymous advertisement sources and combined with a variety of symbolic images from art history to pop culture, the emotionally charged figures she represents are alive with agency. These figures confront myths and morality tales to speak of the lived female experience. Through hyper-detailed drawings and lush washes of color, ornate patterns and playful craft materials, her work intends to use beauty to lure the viewer in, to reveal powerful narratives of fortitude and residual trauma.