About
Nicole Shaffer is a Bay Area artist with a focus on research based installations. They incorporate historical research, family history, and passed down craft techniques to make sculptures that center the lived experiences of gender variant, queer, and neurodiverse/mad people. They intercede private and public spaces through the creation of “speculative furniture,” ceramic and upholstery sculptures that suggest non-normative ways of being a body and experiencing support.
Nicole lives and works in Oakland and so did their grandma. They create work that is built and activated in sites significant to their personal history and subsequently has shown installations in a variety of non-traditional private and public spaces throughout the Bay Area including an abandoned cult commune, their father's home in the days leading to his eviction, and a fabricated private beach for their mom beside the port of Oakland. Nicole is a current Fellow at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley and 2025 resident at Real Time and Space Studios in Oakland. They were exhibiting artist in Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and a 2023 Graduate Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts. Their work has been exhibited at galleries and museums in the Bay Area including YBCA, Southern Exposure, SOMArts, 500 Capp Street, 41 Ross, and Root Division. They were a distinguished graduate of their 2022 class at San Francisco State University, and recipient of the 2019 Murphy Cadogan award.
