Sherry Arndt, Wake Me, 2022, Acrylic and mixed media, 36 x 36 inches
My Agency
Sherry ArndtJul 18 5:00pm — Oct 4, 2025 2:00pm
Stepping into “My Agency” (the current solo exhibition by Sherry Arndt at Beebe’s at the Gallery) is to enter a kind of emotional topology — a shifting terrain of fissures, reconnections, and hidden histories made visible. This exhibition is a moment of agency: the artist consciously confronting the forces that fracture us, and reclaiming power in what remains.
Arndt’s biography is one of movement and adaptation. Born in Erie, Pennsylvania into a military family, she moved some 28 times living in states like Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and abroad in Germany. The discipline of being “on time, never late,” and the rigid penalties for small mistakes left a deep imprint. In this structure, order and control were paramount but life, and memory, rarely abide by strict lines. Her background in exploring the world led to her interest in people's behaviors and psychologies as she makes visible the inner histories we carry.
Her formative years of travel led to an interest in people's behaviors, psychologies, and the inner stories we carry. She studied psychology (BA, Edinboro University, 1998), then for years has worked in medical sales surrounded by rules, constraints, systems. All the while, she has carried a quiet but persistent pull toward poetry, experimentation, making. There came a moment in the path of motherhood where she declared to herself: "I’m going to do what I want to do."
That decision led her into the studio world, initially guided by realist painter Mark DiVincenzo, who became a mentor. Over time, Arndt liberated herself from strict realism and found her own visual language built around abstraction, process, erasure, layering, and the tension between what is revealed and what is concealed.
Arndt’s process is a psychic map, deeply symbolic and materially rich. She works in multiple layers, at least five in each painting, combining acrylics, textural media, sand, glass, beads, and other materials. She also uses chemical agents to break up paint, dragging and pulling it, partially removing layers to expose what lies beneath. The cracked surfaces, fissures, and traces that result feel like scars or memory lines behind the scenes of an emotional life.
In her artist talk at Hunt Art Gallery, she described the metaphorical logic: something comes along, breaks the structure, and we must reassemble, reconnect the fragments, even when the cracks remain visible. The background, she said, “pushes through to the forefront.” Over time, the disparate parts must cohere again and find resonance. There's beauty and truth in imperfection, in rupture. She enjoys the physicality of painting, especially in a large scale.
Titles are important to Arndt. She keeps a running journal of phrases, overheard lines, fragments of conversation, for instance, her daughter Rhea, at age six, once said, “everything and nothing all at the same time.” These resonant lines become prompts for her abstract forms, helping the viewer access emotion beyond the purely visual.
The title My Agency points to a reclaiming of self. The cracks and breaks in Arndt’s paintings are not mistakes but signs of survival, of piecing life back together. Viewers are invited to enter this process, bringing their own memories. The work becomes a mirror and a map, showing both trauma and resilience, and leaving space for each person to find their own meaning.
The show also raises questions: At what point does breakdown become transformation? How much of the past must remain visible for us to heal, to shift, to reemerge? Arndt doesn’t attempt to flatten everything into smoothness; she seems to trust that authenticity lies in the ragged edges, the traces we cannot fully erase. Her work is a celebration of the power to endure, to reconfigure, and breakthrough.
Stepping into “My Agency” (the current solo exhibition by Sherry Arndt at Beebe’s at the Gallery) is to enter a kind of emotional topology — a shifting terrain of fissures, reconnections, and hidden histories made visible. This exhibition is a moment of agency: the artist consciously confronting the forces that fracture us, and reclaiming power in what remains.
Arndt’s biography is one of movement and adaptation. Born in Erie, Pennsylvania into a military family, she moved some 28 times living in states like Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and abroad in Germany. The discipline of being “on time, never late,” and the rigid penalties for small mistakes left a deep imprint. In this structure, order and control were paramount but life, and memory, rarely abide by strict lines. Her background in exploring the world led to her interest in people's behaviors and psychologies as she makes visible the inner histories we carry.
Her formative years of travel led to an interest in people's behaviors, psychologies, and the inner stories we carry. She studied psychology (BA, Edinboro University, 1998), then for years has worked in medical sales surrounded by rules, constraints, systems. All the while, she has carried a quiet but persistent pull toward poetry, experimentation, making. There came a moment in the path of motherhood where she declared to herself: "I’m going to do what I want to do."
That decision led her into the studio world, initially guided by realist painter Mark DiVincenzo, who became a mentor. Over time, Arndt liberated herself from strict realism and found her own visual language built around abstraction, process, erasure, layering, and the tension between what is revealed and what is concealed.
Arndt’s process is a psychic map, deeply symbolic and materially rich. She works in multiple layers, at least five in each painting, combining acrylics, textural media, sand, glass, beads, and other materials. She also uses chemical agents to break up paint, dragging and pulling it, partially removing layers to expose what lies beneath. The cracked surfaces, fissures, and traces that result feel like scars or memory lines behind the scenes of an emotional life.
In her artist talk at Hunt Art Gallery, she described the metaphorical logic: something comes along, breaks the structure, and we must reassemble, reconnect the fragments, even when the cracks remain visible. The background, she said, “pushes through to the forefront.” Over time, the disparate parts must cohere again and find resonance. There's beauty and truth in imperfection, in rupture. She enjoys the physicality of painting, especially in a large scale.
Titles are important to Arndt. She keeps a running journal of phrases, overheard lines, fragments of conversation, for instance, her daughter Rhea, at age six, once said, “everything and nothing all at the same time.” These resonant lines become prompts for her abstract forms, helping the viewer access emotion beyond the purely visual.
The title My Agency points to a reclaiming of self. The cracks and breaks in Arndt’s paintings are not mistakes but signs of survival, of piecing life back together. Viewers are invited to enter this process, bringing their own memories. The work becomes a mirror and a map, showing both trauma and resilience, and leaving space for each person to find their own meaning.
The show also raises questions: At what point does breakdown become transformation? How much of the past must remain visible for us to heal, to shift, to reemerge? Arndt doesn’t attempt to flatten everything into smoothness; she seems to trust that authenticity lies in the ragged edges, the traces we cannot fully erase. Her work is a celebration of the power to endure, to reconfigure, and breakthrough.