BIO

Shelly Malkin is a dedicated environmentalist and outdoors woman whose passion for skiing and climbing has taken her around the world. The natural landscapes that she encounters provide inspiration for her large-scale watercolors, which sensitively combine mica and iridescent pigments to create sweeping panoramas that are both intimate and expansive. She also practices aerial silks which informs her sense of aerial perspective that she incorporates into her work.

“Her confident, large-scale watercolors offer a bold new interpretation of the American painting tradition that seeks to express a transcendental attachment to the sublime in nature,” says art historian Eileen Guggenheim.

Malkin’s work, with its interplay of memory and imagination, evokes the poetic clarity of Milton Avery and the spiritual atmosphere of J. M. W. Turner.

Raised in New York City, Malkin attended the Dalton School and Princeton University, where she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Art History. She later studied painting at the School of Visual Arts and the National Academy of Design under Serge Hollerbach, and later at Silvermine Arts Center and the Renaissance Workshop of Dmitri Wright.

Malkin has exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions, including four solo shows at Graham Shay 1857 in New York City. She is represented by Graham Shay 1857 in New York City and by ARC Fine Art in Fairfield, Connecticut, and East Hampton, New York.

Malkin is an honorary trustee of the New York Restoration Project, an organization that collaborates with communities to build gardens and restore green spaces in New York City, and she serves on the education committee of the New York Botanical Garden. She also is an honorary trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, where she has served on the board for twenty-one years. She currently serves on the advisory board of NYC Connect, an organization that partners with visionaries in New York City to address local challenges and drive progress, and on the advisory council of the Princeton University Art Museum.

Malkin lives and works in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Aspen, Colorado.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS AT GRAHAM SHAY 1857:

MIND JOURNEYS, 2013

OF PARADISE, STORMS, AND BUTTERFLIES, 2017

CLOUDS IN MY KARMA, 2021

REMEMBRANCE OF SNOWS PAST, 2025