Location: Richmond, CA
Medium: Ceramics, painting, performance, film, collage
Website: niadart.org
Heather Hamann, born in 1990, is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Bay Area. She has worked out of NIAD Art Center in Richmond, California — a progressive studio program for artists with developmental disabilities — since 2019. In that time she has become one of the studio’s most prolific storytellers, developing an ever-expanding fantasy universe across ceramics, watercolor, artist books, costume-making, and film.
Hamann’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Oakland Museum of California, Sonoma State University, Contra Costa College San Pablo, UC Hastings Law in San Francisco, and Mills College Art Museum, which acquired her 2019 ink-and-collage piece Village as part of a 2021 student-led acquisition project to diversify the museum’s permanent collection. Her work has also traveled outside the Bay Area, appearing in the “Connect the Dots” exhibition at the SAIC Wellness Center Gallery in Chicago. In October 2024, NIAD’s Main Gallery presented Telling Stories Even in Our Dreams, a two-person show organized by artist Liz Hernández that paired Hamann’s sculptures, paintings, and artist books with the work of Michael Nuñez.
Hamann builds what she describes as “medieval kingdoms, enchanted princess castles, mushroom kingdoms, the weefolk forest” — an expanding cast of fairy-tale realms rendered across media. She hand-builds slab-constructed ceramic dioramas of palaces, fountains, carousels, and forests, and sculpts miniature foods — baskets of strawberries and potatoes, roasted chickens, mini picnic spreads — sized for the fairy folk who inhabit her stories. Her works on paper combine ink line work with collaged floral patterns, using decorative paper to build house frames and rooftops in which faces quietly emerge, as in Village (2019), which encodes the unseen social labor of neighborhood women into a map of a fantasy village.
More recently her practice has expanded into performance and film. In her “Dance of the Kingdom” series — including Dance of the Krystal Kingdom and Dance of the Bird Kingdom — Hamann writes, choreographs, and stars in short films that fuse spoken word and movement with hand-stitched costumes she designs herself, performing against green-screen backdrops of her own digitally animated artwork so that she appears to step in and out of her drawings. Across all of these forms, her work retains what one curator described as “an enchanting stillness” — an invitation for viewers to imagine themselves inside the castle, at the picnic, or in the dress.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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