Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Installation, sculpture, textiles, video, collage
Website: nicolekshaffer.com
Nicole Shaffer is an Oakland-based interdisciplinary visual artist whose practice centers research-based installation, sculpture, and inherited craft methods. They received their MFA in sculpture and installation from San Francisco State University in 2022 as a distinguished graduate, and earned the Murphy Cadogan Award in 2019. Shaffer has deep generational roots in the Bay Area — their grandmother also lived in Oakland — and their work consistently draws on local archives, family histories, and the region’s institutional past.
Shaffer has held fellowships and residencies at leading Bay Area institutions including a 2022–2023 Graduate Fellowship at Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, a fellowship at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, and a 2025 studio residency at Real Time & Space in Oakland. Their work has been exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, SOMArts, 500 Capp Street, 41 Ross, Root Division, and the Port of Oakland, among other venues.
Shaffer’s work operates at the intersection of sculpture, upholstery, ceramics, textile, video, and collage to create what they call “speculative furniture” — objects that propose non-normative ways of inhabiting a body and experiencing support. Their installations draw from local institutional archives, horticulture histories, and queer, trans, and disability lineages to reclaim a sense of belonging that has been historically denied to gender-variant, neurodivergent, and mad lives. Works are often site-specific, activated in spaces of personal significance: an abandoned cult commune, a father’s home facing eviction, a fabricated beach beside the Port of Oakland. Across media, Shaffer pursues what they describe as “poetic and phenomenal understanding” — making space for non-normative temporalities, embodied pleasure, and collective healing.
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