Bio

Abby Shoaf was born in 1991 in small town Tyro, NC.  Raised by a pious family that includes an interior designer, faux painter, high school English teacher and English professor, Shoaf knew the value and power of words along with creating beautiful spaces. She chose to focus on visual communication filling the gaps between words that fail to fully convey.  In high school as President of the Art Club Shoaf advocated for art and viewed it as necessity not extracurricular.  Shoaf came to Memphis, TN in 2009.  Graduated from Memphis College of Art in 2013 with a BFA in Painting with a minor in Art History, and as the President of the Student Body.  Now she is a mother, living and working from her dining room in Orange Mound. All the past has culminated in Shoaf’s practice specializing in perceptive and evocative abstract acrylic paintings and questioning performances. Shoaf expresses her experience of spiritual awakening through paintings of eye floaters and their relationship with seemingly evasive transcendent historical truths.  

In her powerful series “Floaters”, Shoaf proposes the choice of visual/spiritual interpretation beyond the limited subjectivity of words in a provocative way. Shoaf invocates viewers to search their soul and share with them a sense of common inquisition, to find unnoticed elements of reality though the lens of the nonverbal human psyche. 

In 2020 Shoaf’s exhibition Adopt, was presented through social media and presented a tarp filled room and tarp-clad artist. Abstract paintings based on taking chances safely were presented and stacked to build a haphazard structure.  This series, removed from physical interaction, reached out and expressed another layer of spiritual interconnection through shared true truths which words often fail to say.