Contact Information
virginiashirley@telepak.net
601 707-3131

Virginia Shirley’s award-winning artwork has been selected for exhibition in over twenty museums and commercial galleries, as well as numerous juried art competitions. Two pieces of her work are included in the permanent collection of the Cottonlandia Museum in Greenwood, Mississippi.

Virginia is a member of Mississippi Art Colony, The Montgomery (AL) Art Guild, South Mississippi Art Association, and the National Oil and Acrylic Painters Society. She studied art at the University of Alabama, the Taos Institute of Arts in New Mexico, and under a grant program of The Alabama Council of the Arts. She is former executive director of the ArtsAlliance of Jackson & Hinds County (MS), and former program director of the Mississippi Arts Commission.

Primarily working now in oil on canvas, she is also an accomplished potter. Her works in clay use a hand-built, coil technique, finished with her hand-mixed glazes fired in a gas kiln. Her work in clay has been exhibited in commercial galleries in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi, and received a purchase award at Cottonlandia Museum.

After growing up in Montgomery, Alabama, Virginia attended Berea College and the University of Alabama, where she graduated with a degree in Southern Folklife Studies from the New College. She now lives in Madison, Miss. with her husband Philip . She divides her time between Jackson, Dauphin Island,  Alabama, and the Blue Moon Lodge she and her husband built on a mountain overlooking Paint Rock Valley in Northeast Alabama's Cumberland Mountains.