Sharon Harper’s work explores technology and perception. Her experimental work uses photography and video to create poetic connections between ourselves and the environment. Harper’s work is in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo; the Harvard Art Museums; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in Santa Barbara; the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City; The New York Public Library; and the Denver Art Museum among other collections. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, a Meredith S. Moody Residency Fellowship, and an Elizabeth Ames Residency Fellowship at Yaddo, a Sam and Dusty Boynton Residency Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center, and residency fellowships at the Headlands Center, MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Monastery of Halsnøy, and the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Kentucky. A monograph of her work, From Above and Below, was published by Radius Books in 2013. Her work is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art, New York.
Harper’s most recent work “Some Observations on Movements of the Earth” is an ongoing series of photographs supported by the Guggenheim Foundation in 2014-2015, the Harvard University Climate Change Solutions Fund 2019-2019, and the Harvard University Asia Center 2019. The series is focused on reading land formation and the phenomena that shape it in geologic deep time and in the present, emphasizing the agency of the earth. The current phase of the project is to respond to faster processes that transform the land in a human time span such as landslides, forest fires, flash floods, and coastal erosion.
Sharon Harper
Studios
Nef
Sharon Harper worked in the Nef studio.
Nef Studio, the first entirely new studio built after 1937, was donated by esteemed photographer, explorer, author, and MacDowell Fellow Evelyn Steffanson Nef in 1992. Endowed funds for the studio’s maintenance in perpetuity and an annual Fellowship for photographers were given in addition to funds for construction. Mrs. Nef said she had known about MacDowell all her…