Emily Harter is an interdisciplinary artist based in San Francisco, CA. Influenced by convergent backgrounds in painting, printmaking, and art history, her work depicts worlds populated by hedonistic shape-shifters and ruled by cartoon logic. Drawing from a wide array of references, including Netherlandish genre painting, the satirical prints of Hogarth and Daumier, and the Golden Age of American cartoons, she aims to interrogate identity, obligation, and that ol’ horizon of desire. In other words:
In the Grand Drama everyone has their role ( ...pilgrims plodding along the old dirt road… ) by which we are defined to ourselves, and so also in relation to each other. Inhabiting a name like a costume and taking up arms, performing a series of actions to be borne out how they have always been.
But the energy lies in the distance! The bolt arcing between two poles opposed. That fundamental incompatibility of what we are and what we are called. A violence of desire, to hint at, to tilt the impact, to move towards that ever-shifting horizon. To say nothing of what is caught in the crosshairs. The little man hunts the duck and the rabbit, and the pheasant mounted on the wall can no longer remember when, or why, it was shot. The dogs ruffle round in the brush, the spotlight glints off of their studded collars. I think I’m headed in the right direction only to find I’ve been riding the horse backwards all along.
Harter’s work has been shown throughout the United States, including solo exhibitions at Hesse Flatow (New York), OCHI Projects OVR (Los Angeles) and Cleaner Gallery (Chicago). She has been a resident artist at The Lighthouse Works (Fisher’s Island, NY), Arts, Letters, and Numbers (Averill Park, NY), and After 1920 (San Diego). Awards include the 2025-2026 Headlands Graduate Fellowship, the AAF/Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts, the Cadogan Scholarship, and the 2020 Travel Grant from the Mid-America Print Council. She has published etchings with Hoofprint Studios (Chicago) and Bohemian Press at the University of Minnesota. In 2020, she co-founded Pigeon Hole Press in Chicago, which produces and publishes fine art intaglio prints. Harter holds an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University and a BA in Studio Art and Art History from Oberlin College.
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