Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing
Website: jonshannonrogers.com
Jon Shannon Rogers was born in 1984 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He earned his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008, and his MFA from the New York Studio School in 2011. He also studied at the International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in Umbria, Italy in 2007. He lives in Oakland and maintains a studio in Emeryville.
After completing his graduate studies, Rogers taught as an adjunct professor at Henderson State University and Hendrix College in Arkansas (2012–2014) before relocating to the Bay Area. His work has been featured in New American Paintings (Issue 181, Pacific Coast, 2025), and a work from his 2014 residency at Dumfries House in Scotland was selected for the Royal Collection of HRH the Prince of Wales. He has been recognized as one of the “Top 100 Under 100: New Superstars of Southern Art” by Oxford American magazine (2012).
Rogers is represented by Part 2 Gallery in Oakland, where he has had multiple solo exhibitions since 2023. He previously showed with Hang Art and Book and Job Gallery in San Francisco.
Rogers works primarily in oil on canvas and linen, with watercolor on paper as a secondary practice. His paintings operate as exercises in geometric abstraction in which color, form, and layered line create what he describes as chromatic enigmas — worlds unto themselves that shift and evolve according to the perceptions of the viewer. Rather than depicting literal subjects, his canvases generate meaning through phenomenological experience: the webs of vibrant color and implied structure invite navigation rather than reading.
Over the course of his career Rogers has moved from tightly structured, explicitly delineated forms toward an embrace of fluidity and implied line, in which up to eighteen colors per painting generate optical density and temporal complexity. His work draws on Modernist abstraction, Renaissance compositional clarity, Baroque surface richness, and Cubist investigation of time — producing paintings that are simultaneously still and in motion.
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