She first received public acclaim in 1950 for her painting Tribute to the American Working People, a five-image polyptych conceived in the form of a Renaissance altarpiece, except that its central figure is a factory worker and not a saint.

[1] She first received public notice when her work Workers and Paintings (1943) was included in the legendary 1946 "Fourteen Americans" show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by Dorothy Canning Miller.

Unlike many of her New York contemporaries including Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Sharrer did not take the turn to abstract expressionism and continued to paint in a figurative and academic style, although the content of her work was often mordantly witty.

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).

Despite her meticulous technique, luminous color palette, and eye for telling detail reminiscent of Flemish painters, she was a modernist in sensibility and subject.

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.

As their curator explains, the painting came in part from Sharrer's interest in examining the intersection of myth and the celebrity culture that surrounded Presley and other popular entertainment figures in the early 1960s.