About

Shannon Rae Fincke (b. 1974, Pennsylvania, United States) is a Los Angeles-based artist who creates paintings on wood, clayboard, canvas, and yupo paper. Her work explores ephemerality, interconnectivity, memories, emotions, and psychology—and is 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, concentrating on control and intentionality versus 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, has been exhibited internationally, and has been featured in print, film, and television. Her work has been shown at Mount Saint Mary University’s Jose Drudis-Biada Art Gallery, Torrance Art Museum’s TRYST Art Fair, Brand Library and Art Center, and Angels Gate Cultural Center in LA; Chautauqua Institute School of Art, in Chautauqua, NY; The Stairwell Space, in Bridgeport, CT; Spilt Milk Gallery in the UK; BHA Gallery in Canada; and Women United Art Movement Gallery in Czech Republic, amongst others. She is the recipient of a DAWA residency, and has been featured by I Like Your Work, Voyage LA Magazine, CanvasRebel, VVrkshop Art, Shoutout LA, Women United Art Magazine, Art Mums United Podcast, and more. She has also presented talks and served on panels for organizations such as Sustainable Arts Foundation, Polytechnic School, and Mount Saint Mary’s University. 

Shannon attended the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts, 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 degree 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 artist Arnold Mesches.

Shannon is also an established art educator, administrator, curator, and gallerist. She has directed programs and instructed art for over 25 years in a wide variety of capacities, and in 2011 founded Institute for Visual Arts in Los Angeles, a community-based art school for children, teens, and adults, where she currently serves as Executive Director. In 2023 she founded a contemporary female-focused gallery concentrating on mid-career artists and on creating connections and conversation in Los Angeles called The Middle Room. Formerly of New York City, she has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 2002, where she resides with her three daughters.