Sheila Crider graduated with a University Degree from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and became active in the literary community of her native Washington, DC. She was published in a number of small press journals including The Greenfield Review. She appeared in the Ascension Poetry Reading Series organized by E. Ethelbert Miller and was a founding member of Free DC the Writers’ Workshop led by AB Spellman. She wrote and produced several staged readings/performances including Soliloquy by the Bona Fide Adam’s Rib-type Woman, Eve (1982); shi & him (with Samuel Johnson, 1985); Learning, The Hard Way (1989) and The Adventures of Ms. Mondiale (1992). She also began researching and experimenting with the pictorial properties of poetry, publishing the essays The Use of Language as Art (1980) and Art as Language (1984).
Sheila relocated to Bordeaux, France for the next six years. Her focus and research shifted to art movements since Modernism and abstract art language. With a goal of integrating image, object and frame, she began exploring traditional materials associated with painting, drawing and craft techniques, particularly weaving and stitching. In 2000, she coined the term blackstraction to describe this way of working. A project to add the word and definition to the fine art lexicon, Putting the Word Out: Blackstraction, has included a staged reading of the same name and anonymous distribution of the term and definition in “official” fine art venues such as The Black fine Art Show in NY, Art Basel Miami and Emerge Art Fair, here is DC.
She has been artist-in-residence at the Leighton Studios of the Banff Center in Alberta, Canada (2006), The Vermont Studio Center (2001), and Cite Internationale des Arts in 1997 and 1989. In 1999, she apprenticed for three months with Sumi-e ink master Kohei Takagaki in Aioi, Japan. She also participated in a week-long workshop learning traditional paper making at the Mino Washi Paper Museum in Mino.
In 1997, 1998 and 2003, she received Small Project Grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She was nominated for a Tiffany Foundation Award in 2003 and again in 2005. She has served on grant review and public art selection panels for the DC Commission on the Arts. She is a long time member and supporter of Washington Project for the Arts and is active with the recently formed Ward 8 Arts and Culture Committee. Recent commissions have included public art for the New St. Elizabeths’ Hospital, Anacostia High School, Community of Hope Conway Clinic, and St. Elizabeth East and the Concord Apartment Building in Crystal City.
Sheila Crider currently lives and works in SE.