Artist Annie Sheng

 The Community Arts Partnership is thrilled to support artists like Annie Sheng through our Artist in Community Grant (AICG). The AICG grant is a program of New York State Council on the Arts "Statewide Community Regrants," and gives Tompkins County artists the opportunity to share their work in an immersive way with a local community of their choosing. It is through grants like this that CAP is able to keep Ithaca’s vibrant art scene alive.

Annie Sheng is a visual artist, martial artist, and speculative fiction writer. Her visual art includes acrylic painting, watercolor, and sumi ink on canvas or watercolor paper. She also works in ceramics and mixed media. Her work is speculative and narrative in nature and draws from her identity as a person of Asian heritage and her anthropological background (Ph.D. Anthropology, Cornell University, 2022).

She received AICG funding to create eight large-scale paintings in the form of Kokeshi portraits (Japanese traditional wooden doll crafts), drawing inspiration from interviews with community members, mostly BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ populations. She will also paint eight wooden dolls, drawing from the same interviews.

She is hosting two events, where people of all ages can create Kokeshi dolls at the Lansing Community Library. Come to the library on Saturday, Nov 8th and Nov 15th, 11 am-12:30 pm to create and learn.

"The reason I want to paint kokeshi is because I want to highlight this Asian art form and bring more attention to local Asian-style arts while simultaneously drawing from historically marginalized local community members to bring their portraits to life in modern depictions of this traditional craft."

-Annie Sheng (Multifaceted Artist)