Whitney Sparks is a writer, artist, and radical teacher. Her mixed media artwork and writing have been exhibited around the world from Athens, Berlin, and Bangkok to Chicago, Zurich, and Prague.
Ms. Sparks has self-published two illustrated works of fiction, The Riddle of the Sphinx and Nefertiti Escapes, and contributed to periodicals such as BusinessWeek, New York, Worth, Terra Incognita, Wake Up World, and XOJane.
Creative education and avid reading were the foundation of Whitney's unconventional, world-schooled childhood. After earning her bachelor's degree in American Studies with distinction from Yale, Sparks went on to study permaculture, yoga, and birth work across the States and Southeast Asia, later completing a Masters of Fine Art, concentrating on the production of visual art, in Switzerland. Ms. Sparks is a solo parent of one three year old, and the author most recently of Just Boundaries– ebook now available! – and the forthcoming Radical Care: the Nature of Sacred Solidarity.
EXHIBITS
Art
December 2018 - February 2019 “Angry Black Girl Magical Realism” Subrosa, Santa Cruz
March 2018 “ARTmadillo” Armadillo, Chicago
May 2015 “Art Spa: Reflection Pool” solo exhibition at The Solution. gallery, Prague
November 2014 “The Runaway Comeback” premieres at the International Film Poetry Festival, Athens
April 2014 Flying Saucer Video Magazine launched
March 2014 Nefertiti Escapes art book published
February 2014 “Blur the House Down” solo exhibition at ONO Gallery Zürich
February 2014 “Bed-Floating Day” performance at Køpi Geburtstag Queer Takeover
December 2013 “Flag Fire” short film premiere @ International Film Poetry Festival - Athens
August 2013 - January 2014 Le Twist Sans Frontieres - Zureich/Prague
June 2013 “Embodied” - Á la recherche de la bohéme perdue | The Divo Institute, Czech Republic
June 2013 “SPACE TAKER + SWEET REBELLION” @ Zurich University of the Arts MFA
May 2013 Day of Laziness Paradeplatz, Zurich
April 2013 Total Freedom World Tour, Zurich
January 2013 "Unearthed" solo show @ Die Werbefläche, Zurich
January 2013 “Kali in the Hole” 12 hour live collage @ Dear Catastrophe Group Show, LOCH Zurich
December 2012 "FREE / MISSING / WANTED" solo show @ ONO Gallery Zurich
October 2012 "The Riddle of the Sphinx" solo show at K-Set Archiv, Zurich
May 2012 “Work Discourse in the Woods” Zurichberg, Switzerland
April 2012 “The Kitchen Communion” @ Instant Favelas, Zurich
January 2012 “NO EXIT” @ Uwaga, Zurich
August 2011 solo show @ Fox Hollow, Houston
April 2010 Open Dharma group show in Sattal, India
May 2007 Yale Undergraduate Art Dept. Final Show @ Yale University, New Haven
“Who is a Princess?” @ Yale University, New Haven USA
April 2006 “No Memory” @ Yale University, New Haven USA
Ongoing: the parasite book project international
Whitney Sparks, especially fascinated by the border areas between reality and what we call fiction or figments of our imagination, likes to imagine herself an illustrative Scheherazade, composing perpetual fractured fairy tales in mixed media assemblage and film. In her work, mass culture transforms into a kind of visual compost, nurturing the seeds of future revolutions. Responding to various events and places, working with found things and chance, Sparks makes observations through collecting, cutting, drawing, planting, painting, pasting, writing, and recording. What is the story-- at any given place or time-- and how does it abide, change, evolve, or dissolve? She edits her findings to reveal another reality. One of Black liberation perhaps...
Where imaginary lands grow, root, and weather, tangled beasts engage in unknown rituals. Choreographing perspectives on the body, indigeneity, ethnicity, natural phenomena, urban surroundings and elements of spiritual iconography, Sparks reorganizes information over a range of media, from paper to wood to web. Her videos and collages weave together myriad coincidences of society and texture, beguiling viewers to learn a quixotic cartography of meta experiences that play with the human condition.