African American Artist

 

Sharryl Cross is an artist and fashion designer from Detroit, Michigan who earned a Bachelor of Science in Apparel and Textile Design from Michigan State University.  In 2008 she moved to New York to begin a career as a fashion designer.  Her 12 1/2 year success in the fashion industry heavily influenced her desire to become an artist.  Like fashion design, through an imaginative lens Cross uses vibrant bold color, shapes, textures, movement, and patterns to communicate a contemporary art perspective in drawing and painting.

She comes from a family of artists and musicians, her​ grandfather Robert G. Alexander being one of them. Her interest in painting was initiated by lessons from him in 2003. He was a self-taught artist whose work she marveled throughout her childhood. In the later years of her grandfather’s career, he began painting natural landscapes inspired by painter Bob Ross. He taught Cross to paint with oils which led to her first two landscape paintings.  A small fire within her was ignited to develop her inherited drawing and painting ability. Like her grandfather Cross is now following in his footsteps, with the exception of a few lessons from him she continues as a self-taught artist, but he will always remain one of her biggest inspirations.

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