Website: https://www.tanyawischerath.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tanyawischerath/
Artist Bio
Tanya Wischerath is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco, working across oil painting, printmaking, paper cutting, and large-scale mural projects. Her work explores cycles of dormancy, transformation, and emergence, drawing inspiration from ecological and biological systems such as fungi, root networks, and subterranean life. These natural processes function both as subject matter and metaphor, reflecting the often invisible labor of transformation, becoming, and survival. Her work is deeply informed by queer histories and experiences of living outside conventional structures, particularly the ways identities and communities can gather strength and find visibility in spaces of obscurity.
Wischerath’s practice is based in classical atelier training in Italy, where she developed a rigorous foundation in drawing and observational accuracy. This technical discipline informs compositions that bring rendered figures into dreamy, organic environments. Figures often emerge from darkness, shadow, foliage, or obscured spaces; their bodies partially concealed or dissolving into their surroundings. This tension between visibility and concealment reflects both the vulnerability of being seen and the refuge that can exist in remaining hidden. Her visual language frequently blurs the boundary between human body and landscape, suggesting a porous relationship between people and the systems that sustain them.
Public art plays a significant role in Wischerath’s practice. Her large-scale work engages with queer history, community memory, and figures whose stories have often been overlooked or obscured. In 2026, she created Conjuring Power: Roots and Futures of Queer and Trans Movements, a 56-foot paper-cut and painted mural installation for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The work traces queer and trans histories through imagery of underground networks, protest, collective action, and organic growth, transforming the visual language of roots and mycelium into a metaphor for communities that survive and build movements beneath the surface.
She has also taught drawing at the Angel Academy of Art in Florence and was selected as the October 2026 Artist in Residence at Zion National Park. Based in San Francisco, Wischerath continues to explore how transformation takes place in darkness before coming into view.
The Bath
Oil paint on birch panel
15.5” x 19.5”
2023
$1680
Tasse Fierté
Glazed porcelain, custom ceramic decals, gold luster
Cup 2.5” x 3.25” x 2.5”
Saucer 1.25” x 4” x 4”
2025
$100
Interiors
Oil paint on panel
10” x 8”
2020
$960
Interiors II
Oil paint on panel
9” x 12”
2020
$1320
The Modern Queer Tarot
78-card deck
2024
$24.95
The Modern Queer Tarot is a 78-card deck of archetypes embodied by historical queer figures and events. It was conceptualized and written by Robert Barber and John Callaghan, who commissioned me to illustrate the deck in 2021. Each of the 22 Major Arcana cards were painted by hand in Acrylic Gouache, the remaining minor arcana were illustrated digitally. The project brings together her longstanding interests in mythology, symbolism, portraiture, and narrative, while creating a visual record of queer lives and histories.
To purchase The Modern Queer Tarot scan the QR code
