Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, printmaking, ceramics, drawing
Website: emilyharter.com
Emily Harter was born in 1997 in Baltimore, Maryland. She began her studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 before completing a BA in studio art and art history at Oberlin College in 2017. She went on to earn an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University in 2025, and now lives and works in San Francisco.
While based in Chicago in the years before graduate school, Harter co-founded Pigeon Hole Press, a studio producing and publishing fine art intaglio prints, and exhibited widely, including at Cleaner Gallery and the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative. Her career has been marked by a string of residencies and awards: After 1920 in San Diego (2019), Arts, Letters, and Numbers in Averill Park, NY (2020), a Mid-America Print Council travel grant (2020), and Lighthouse Works on Fisher’s Island, NY (2022). During her MFA she received the Edwin Anthony and Adalaine Boudreaux Cadogan Scholarship (2024) and the AAF/Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts, which funded a fellowship at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Austria (2025).
Harter’s thesis work was shown in Present Histories, the 2025 Stanford MFA Thesis Exhibition, and she joined the gallery HESSE FLATOW in New York that same year, following a first solo show there in 2024. She is currently a 2025–2026 Graduate Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, where she is developing a new body of paintings and ceramics.
Harter is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, printmaking, ceramics, and drawing, with a practice shaped by her convergent backgrounds in printmaking and art history. Her images populate a world of hedonistic shape-shifters governed by cartoon logic, drawing on Netherlandish genre painting, the satirical prints of Hogarth and Daumier, and Golden Age American animation to interrogate identity, obligation, and desire.
Recent bodies of work have used historical allegorical frameworks — the Four Seasons, the Four Humors, the hunting scene — to stage contemporary anxieties: bodily desire, ecological catastrophe, and collective moods. In her current Headlands fellowship project, she is researching early modern ideas of folly, drawing on Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff and Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, to produce a related series of paintings and ceramics.
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