ARTIST BIO

Amber L. DuBoise-Shepherd has an AA from Seminole State College and received her BFA from Oklahoma State University with a minor in Business Entrepreneurship. Her mixed media pieces and oil paintings reference an illustrative quality. She depicts contemporary Native American narratives based on her family heritage of Navajo (Enrolled), Sac & Fox (Affiliated), and Prairie Band Potawatomi (Affiliated). She was accepted into OVAC’s Momentum exhibition in 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. In 2021, she was accepted as a Spotlight Artist by the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition. She won grand prize and runner up in the IMAGEN Art Competition: “Native Tradition is Medicine: Resilience and Native Lifeways during COVID-19” in 2020. She recently won Honorable Mention in Painting for the 52nd Annual Trail of Tears Art Show & Sale for 2023. DuBoise-Shepherd exhibited work in the Speak While You Can exhibition at the Living Arts Center September through October 2020, and again in 2021. The Speak exhibition allowed her to create artworks incorporating her Native languages in both visual art and audio. DuBoise-Shepherd was commissioned by the First Americans Museum, in 2020, to create and design an original oil painting that was converted into a large mural that is on display for the public in the FAM gallery. Her work was exhibited with four other Native American women artists in this universe is you exhibition at the Oklahoma Hall of Fame Gaylord-Pickens Museum in OKC. In September of 2023, DuBoise-Shepherd was awarded The Rising Star Alumni Award at the Oklahoma State University, College of Arts & Science Hall of Fame ceremony. The Rising Star award is given to previous graduates who have excelled in their careers within 10 years of graduating from OSU.

 

She currently is the Assistant to the Director at the OU School of Visual Arts. She was previously the Manager of Education and Outreach at the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art in Shawnee, OK. She worked with all ages and provided educational art programming through student tours both in person and virtual, art classes and workshops, and providing outreach programs. While at the MGMoA, DuBoise-Shepherd curated the Tkenagen Mnowabmenagwet: The Beauty of Indigenous Cradleboards in 2022, with cradleboards from the Museum of The Red River, and two from her own family. She also started and organized the first two annual MGMoA High School Juried Art Exhibition to allow students the opportunity to share their work and exhibit at a museum. 

 

DuBoise-Shepherd is working with more digital art to create illustrative stories and images based on her Native background. She was recently commissioned by the Sierra Club Magazine to create the Fall 2023 cover and two digital illustrative works for an article over the Land Back Movement. In 2022 she consulted with a publishing company in New York City, New York, on a Native comic book character and illustrated a story based on Native American culture for a group in Canada. In 2022, she created a pilot comic that was accepted to the Comics As Art 2022 exhibit at Literati Press Bookshop, which is based on her Navajo culture. She currently lives in her hometown of Shawnee, OK with her husband Josh Shepherd.