Location: Richmond, CA
Medium: Printmaking, Ceramics, Textiles, Drawing
Website: niadart.org/shana-harper
Shana Harper (born 1982) is a multidisciplinary artist who has worked at NIAD Art Center in Richmond, California, since joining the studio in 2005. Over two decades in NIAD’s cooperative studio environment, she has moved fluidly between drawing, letterpress and linocut printmaking, textiles, and ceramics, building a body of work that ranges from functional objects like napkins and pots to large-scale prints. She frequently collaborates with her sister and fellow NIAD artist Raven Harper.
Her work has been included in group exhibitions organized by NIAD and its peer Bay Area studios, including a dedicated presentation of her letterpress print in UNSEEN: The Hidden Labor of Women at Mills College Art Museum in 2021, and the large-scale traveling survey Into the Brightness: Artists from Creativity Explored, Creative Growth & NIAD at the Oakland Museum of California in 2023. In 2024, she and Raven Harper were the subject of a dedicated exhibition, Sisters Shall Be, at NIAD’s Annex Gallery, and in 2025 she was one of the featured “Limitless” artists at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, where she also led a community linocut printing workshop.
Harper works across a deliberately wide range of media — drawing, letterpress, linocut and monotype printmaking, textiles, and glazed ceramics — treating each shift in material as a way to challenge herself and keep growing as an artist. Her prints often proceed through repetition and variation, reworking a single image again and again until she arrives at a version that feels resolved; her linocut Gold Scroll, an 80-inch scroll printed in an edition of two, is a clear example of this cumulative, meditative approach.
Nature and the people she loves are recurring subjects, and she has spoken about using holes or gaps in her nature scenes as a way of processing emotion, saying “sometimes that’s me, sometimes I’m in a hole trying to get out of it.” Elsewhere her work turns playful and declarative: a 2017 letterpress print now in Mills College Art Museum’s collection spells out “being an artist is the best feeling in the world!” in shifting fonts and alignments — a fitting emblem of the joy she has said the practice gives her.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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