Art Talk With Phyllis Shafer - Tahoe Art League Community Mingle
Join us at the Tahoe Art League Community Mingle for a special evening with acclaimed landscape artist Phyllis Shafer. Renowned for her vibrant, expressive paintings, Shafer brings the natural world to life through color, movement, and a deep sense of place. Don't miss this opportunity to hear from one of today's most compelling landscape painters.
TAL's Third Thursday Community Mingles are free and open to the public. Bring a friend and an appetizer or beverage to share if you like!
Image shown: "Clark’s Day Out (2024)", oil on linen, 48 × 62 inches
American painter Phyllis Shafer (born 1958 in Buffalo, New York) lives and works in the Sierra Nevada and Great Basin region. Although Shafer’s formative years as an artist were spent in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, over the past two decades she has worked primarily in the American West to develop a style of landscape painting that is uniquely her own.
Shafer completed her Bachelor of Arts degree at State University of New York (SUNY) Potsdam, NY in 1980; she spent the 1978-79 academic year living and studying in New York City through a program offered to SUNY students through Empire State College. From 1981 to 1985 Shafer lived and worked as an artist in New York’s East Village before moving to the West Coast in the mid 1980s. She completed her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, Berkeley in 1988.
Shafer moved to the small, northern California coastal community of Bolinas in 1991 and became active in the San Francisco Bay Area arts community. She worked as an adjunct instructor at the Academy of Art College (now University), San Francisco; San Francisco State University; and Diablo Valley College, Pleasant Hill, before accepting a position as full-time instructor at Lake Tahoe Community College in South Lake Tahoe in 1994. She retired from that teaching position in 2021 and is represented by the Stremmel Gallery in Reno, NV, and the Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Pasadena, CA.
In 2014, the Nevada Museum of Art staged a mid-career retrospective of Shafer’s work titled, “I Only Went out for a Walk…” That exhibition, which featured approximately 100 paintings, ranged from work produced in the 1980s to the present. In 2022, the Lilley Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Reno, staged a solo exhibition of Shafer’s work. In November of 2025, the Stremmel Gallery hosted Shafer’s 9th solo exhibition. In August of 2025 the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA, accepted one of Shafer’s paintings, “View from Grants Lake”, into their permanent collection.
