Installation shot of interactive room of FLIGHT, a solo exhibition at UNM Art Museum.
sheri crider is a social practice artist with a robust visual arts practice centered on solace,respite, magic, and belonging. Crider’s journey as an artist has been deeply informed by her personal experiences, which include over a decade of homelessness, addiction, and incarceration. These experiences have shaped her artistic practice and mission. As a multidisciplinary artist, sheri creates spaces that reimagine the best and worst of ourselves. Their work includes interactive sculpture, VR environments, painting and collaborative works that engage wide, nontraditional audiences in galleries, prison cells, street corners, and classrooms.
sheri received an academic tuition waiver and a fine arts scholarship at the University of Arizona where they received a BFA in Ceramics and Queer Theory. Sheri went on to earn a MFA in Sculpture from the University of New Mexico. Sheri is the founder/director of Sanitary Tortilla Factory community art space in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For more than ten years, the space has supported emerging queer and POC artists in a comprehensive way.
sheri’s work has been exhibited nationally with solo and group exhibitions at the University of New Mexico Art Museum, University of Arizona Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe. Crider has been the recipient of multiple grants and fellowships including the inaugural cohort of Open Philanthropy’s Right of Return Fellowship, supporting original artworks to further criminal justice reform, the Andy Warhol Foundation, Youth Civic Infrastructure, and Art For Justice. Her work has been reviewed in critically acclaimed periodicals including PBS Newshour, HyperAllergic and other notable periodicals.
Collaboratively and singularly sheri is deeply dedicated to creative pursuits that center on solace, respite, magic, and belonging.
Mobile Abolition Library –
The Mobile Abolition Library is a visual arts and literacy initiative grounded in an abolitionist framework. The mobile collection and its programming is centered in challenging the systems of surveillance, policing, punishment, and community care. The intention is to be a community-driven project that raises awareness, inspires critical thinking, and fosters discussions about incarceration’s impact on communities.
The project is a collaboration between sheri crider of the Sanitary Tortilla Factory and Bernadine Hernandez + Martìn Wannam of the Fronteristxs collective. sheri designed, built out the library, including the interactive displays, exterior wrap and is creating the portraits for the archive. Additional contributing artists include Delilah Montoya (exterior photo for wrap), John-Mark Collins (coding for interactive screens) and Kaitlin Bryson (first seed library artist). Contributing organizations include Bookworks, ACLUNM and A Good Sign.
The library houses a collection of over 300 books, zines, seed library and portrait archive. The materials in the collection cover topics related to abolition, social justice, and community care. The library emphasizes grassroots and alternative methods to re-imagine the possibility of transforming criminal justice to envision and create a more equitable and sustainable future.
A Fire in My Belly – Collaboration with Obie Weathers III
TRANSVEIL – Collaboration with Obie Weathers III
TRANSVEIL is a mobile surveillance trailer redeployed as a mutual aid and community organizing site. The mobile surveillance trailer redeployed as a mutual aid and community organizing site. The function of piece is to subvert surveillance as a strategy for safety while creating space to re-imagine safety, crime and punishment. The piece mimics local policing tactics equating surveillance and safety. Recreating the device to serve the needs of a community is a powerful gesture. During the six week installation in the Wells Park Neighborhood, the unit served as both fundraising site and a site utilized to distribute fresh vegetables, toiletry items, clothing and referrals for mental health care.
The project became a site for artist and community engagement. Christine Wong Yap organized Flags of Safety and Resilience, a week-long social practice project examining the questions: How do we minimize, mitigate, or cope with threats to our safety? What supports our physical safety? What supports our psychological safety—feeling accepted and respected?
Fronteristx collective, House of An-Aesthesia (HOAA), created a performance that utilizes fashion as a tool to disrupt our collective numbness to the surveillance and policing we experience in everyday spaces. HOAA interrogates the intersections of fashion, race, gender, sexuality, ability, policing, and capitalism in order to build life-affirming communities through an abolitionist framework. The expanded work will work with local artist groups and organizers to expand its local impact.
The first iteration of the project was sited at Off Lomas, a project by Candice Hopkins and Raven Chacon.
TRANSVEIL demonstrates how structural investments in communities might create the most change. Obie Weathers III, is a visual artist currently incarcerated on Texas death row. Weathers work centers on empathy and meditation, while creating work with little resources on the inside.
Alburquerque!!
Albuquerque International Sunport, 2021
In the summer of 21, sheri designed and led a social practice project to create a permanent, monumental public art for the Albuquerque International Sunport. The final 12’x50′ postcard greets travelers with images ranging from original iconography of the Zia Pueblo, the death of a transgender woman at the hands of ICE in 2018, the 1680 pueblo revolt, zinc labor protests, Blackdom and the rarely acknowledged author of the Duran Consent Decree.
The innovative studio employed both system impacted youth artists and youth scholars to reimagine a 1950’s Albuquerque post card. Visiting artists, NANI CHACON (ABQ ), GRACE ROSARIO PERKINS)(ABQ), ANDREA DELEON(ABQ), worked with students in developing finished work for the public art component at the Albuquerque Sunport. The group incorporated working studio discussions, field trips to museums, and visits to critical sites as a backdrop to create the core images that represent the complex history of this region.
Other Targets, 2020
University of Arizona Art Museum
Other TARGET/s connects visual imagery created by M. Jenea Sanchez, Gabriella Munoz, Shontina Vernon and sheri crider with historical artworks from the permanent collection of the University of Arizona Museum of Art. The exhibition was curated by sheri crider and Chelsea Farrar. The artists examine intersections of the complicated histories of prejudice, fear, fascination, and social and economic underpinnings that mine the permanent divisions between us and them while the works on loan anchor the exhibition, citing the long trajectory of “otherness.”
Flight, 2018
The exhibition and series of events were sponsored by the Right of Return Fellowship which supports formerly incarcerated artists creating original works that can further criminal justice reform in partnership with advocates and organizers.
New Mexico Museum of Art, 2017
Bee Hotel, 2016
