Lori Artist Statement

Artist Lori Starnes Isom opens Portrait Studio at Gallery 537 in Camden, SC

Featuring a new series of modern portraits telling a historical tale with Queens at the Opening of Camden's Newest Art gallery, G537 @ 537 East Dekalb St., Camden South Carolina.  

  With years of her life dedicated to working as a professional dancer, singer and actress in New York and Los Angeles, Lori Isom brings the movement, emotion and all the creative elements of theater and dance to her portraits with unusual compositions, structures and colors in a large palette of different mediums from oils, watercolors to pastels, assemblages and collages.  

As a student of the Parsons School of Design with studies in fine art and fashion design, Lori has predominately taught herself the varied techniques of creation in figurative and portrait art.  As an artist, her deepest desire, is to present her subjects in the most sincere and expressive way, making sure the emotion and personality behind the painting is both felt and seen.

Lori has been celebrated in the pages of American Art Collector, interviewed for television and newspaper articles, as well as a featured artist in many group exhibitions. She has been commissioned to paint hundreds of individual and family portraits and is now celebrating the opening of her first portrait studio at G537 gallery in Camden, SC.  Planting herself in a place of deep family roots, she hopes to make portraits more accessible to every one; moving beyond the influence of societal values. Creating a space where anyone can be immortalized in a painting and create an heirloom for generations to come.

EXHIBITIONS:

Gallery 537 - Solo Art Exhibition, Camden, SC. October 2, 2021 - present.

S.C. Water media Society 44th Annual Juried Art Touring Exhibition, Cola 2021-2022. 

Moja Juried Art Exhibition - City Art Gallery, Charleston, SC. September 30 - October 10, 2021. 

Richland County Public Library - Facing Race (group exhibition), Cola. SC, July-September 2021. 

Richland County Public Library - Solo Exhibition. Cola, SC, March 2020

North Charleston City Gallery - Grey Matters: Women in Progress. N. Charleston SC, February 2020 

Supper Table Traveling Exhibition (Jasper Project) Cola, SC, September 2019-present 

Piccolo Spoleto Juried Art Exhibition - Charleston City Gallery, Charleston SC, May - June 2019 

Arts Center of Kershaw County - Duo art exhibition. Camden, SC, October 2018 - November 2018 

North Charleston Cultural Arts Center, Artist-in-Residence - N. Charleston, SC, 2011-2012