Artist and musician Sally Taylor knows what it’s like to feel invisible. A child of famous musicians, she says she spent a lifetime struggling to step out of her parents’ shadow.

On Friday night, she embraced her moment in the sun at the opening of her art exhibit at the Martha’s Vineyard Bank in Chilmark. Her watercolor paintings depict shadows of people, animals and objects and celebrates them as markers of existence and selfhood.

A musician “first and foremost,” Ms. Taylor has been writing music since she was 16 and has released three studio albums under her independent record label. She has also worked in the worlds of art curation and arts education, designing a multidisciplinary curriculum for students.

“When I find a new way of expressing myself, it’s this new angle that I get to play with and it feels so freeing and fun,” she said.

Though Ms. Taylor painted in college, she turned away from the creative practice until two years ago, when she was traveling with her family and found herself using her son’s watercolor paints and brushes. Some of her earliest subjects were animals on the beaches of Morocco. She focused on their long, striking shadows in the sand.

Sally Taylor performing with brother Ben and mom Carly. — Emma Kilbride

“I sat myself near the shoreline and dunked my paintbrush into the ocean and started looking at different things that I could paint from there,” she said.

Her paintings all focus on shadows as subjects, depicting them as both inextricable and independent from the entities that created them. She compared their abiding presence to that of an imaginary friend.

“You’re never alone. There’s always a shadow, [and] it always wants the best for you,” she said. “I have my own shadow, and I can celebrate that.”

Though this is Ms. Taylor’s first time exhibiting her own art, it is not her first foray into the Vineyard art world. For three years, the Island was home to her Consenses exhibit, a collaborative multimedia installation featuring over 350 artists from around the world.

The exhibit was anchored by 22 Vineyard photographs that each started a “strand” of artistic interpretation, extended through a pass-along process. For example, a songwriter’s interpretation of the photograph might be interpreted by a dancer, whose dance is then used for inspiration by a chef. It resembles an artistic game of telephone that spans the five senses and countless artistic mediums.

“Three-hundred-fifty artists who had never met interpreted one another’s art and created this amazing reaction to Martha’s Vineyard without even having ever been here,” she said.

Ms. Taylor is in the process of perfecting interactive “Consenses walks” for the Island, where visitors to a site can scan a QR code to see art inspired by that particular place. She said she’s been using guerrilla marketing to spread the word but is hoping to launch the experience more formally next summer.

She is also working on her music, writing songs with pop rock outfit Train to honor Charlie Colin, the band’s founding bassist and Ms. Taylor’s close friend who died in May. She said they have written a half-dozen songs over the past month-and-a-half.

“All of these different artistic vehicles have been rekindled and made available to me again and in a new way,” she said. “It feels exciting and refreshing.”

For Ms. Taylor, art is best presented in a way that engages multiple senses. Friday’s gallery opening was no exception.

After thanking the audience, she performed an acoustic rendition of a song by 4batz and Kanye West with support from her brother, Ben Taylor on guitar and vocals. The siblings were then joined by their mother, Carly Simon, for a performance of Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time.

Sally Taylor said the rendition marked the family trio’s first public performance in over a decade.

Ms. Taylor was touched by the interest friends, loved ones and complete strangers showed in her exhibition. Half of her pieces were sold by the end of the night. “I was a little bit choked up about it,” she said. “You can’t help but have some insecurity about what you’ve created, especially when [you’ve] never showed any of it to anybody. I was just so completely overwhelmed by people’s responses.”