230,000 applicants to win a national graphic arts Youth Forum prize sponsored by The American Magazine. Subsequently, she attended Yale University School of Art and the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute. During World War II, she worked as a welder in shipyards in California and New Jersey. After an earlier marriage that ended in divorce, in 1947 Sharrer married Perez Zagorin, a prominent historian of Europe. They lived and worked in New York, Amherst, Montreal, London, Rochester, NY and Charlottesville, VA. They had one son, Adam Zagorin, born 1953. Art After a solo exhibition of her paintings in Boston in 1951, Sharrer did not have another solo show until 1969. After another eighteen years she had a 1987 solo exhibition that traveled from New York City to the Memorial Art Gallery (Rochester, NY) and the Danforth Museum (Framingham, MA). While often included in group shows in those intervening periods, and although she worked continuously and diligently on her art, she was often overlooked as "modern art" came to be seen as synonymous with abstract expressionism. So powerful was this association that MoMA had to name its show in 2000 (in which Sharrer was included) as "Modern Art despite Modernism," as if the latter were synonymous with the former. Despite her meticulous technique, luminous color palette, and eye for telling detail reminiscent of Flemish painters, she was a modernist in sensibility and subject. A painting like Resurrection of a Waitress (1984), displays a sly humor in its choice of subject matter that hearkens back to her Tribute, but also shares with the latter a modernist's assumption that the life of a waitress or working man is as deserving of our attention as any saint. The waitress is carried heavenwards—held aloft means of an eggbeater caught in her hair—by a partially nude angel, whose method of propulsion is a whirlygig rather than wings. One of her largest paintings (9 x 6 feet) is a surreal oil on canvas, entitled Leda and the Folks, from 1963. It is one of Sharrer’s earlier forays into surrealism, featuring three somewhat oddly proportioned figures, two of which are based on Elvis Presley's parents, while the third, a Renaissance-like, golden-haired nude young woman, represents Sharrer’s take on the ancient Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, in which Zeus transformed himself into a swan in order to seduce a beautiful woman.