Shana Berger
Artist + Filmmaker
“You're an artist too.”
Shana's first memory is light coming through the glass blocks in her grandparents' stairwell in Wisconsin.
Before she knew what an artist was, she was already making. Stories and songs. Clothes for mutilated Barbies. Dance routines. Friendship bracelets. Baking. Reading aloud to stuffed animals. Her parents recognized creativity as something essential in her and gave her room to follow it.
Even then, her definition of an artist was unusually expansive. As a little girl, she once told her father's hunting buddy that he was an artist because he told great stories and jokes.
“My childhood was about
childhood, but not mine.”
OBSERVING FROM THE EDGES
Shana grew up feeling deeply held by her family and slightly outside the world beyond it.
Her family didn't go to church. Her parents came from Wisconsin. She lived across the river from the community where she went to school. People sometimes couldn't place her and asked, "What are you?"
She learned early what it felt like to be different, and she began identifying with other people who lived outside the expected lines.
At home, another kind of history was unfolding. When Shana was six, memories of her father's traumatic childhood resurfaced. The past became something alive in the present, shaping the emotional world of the entire family.
She became an observer. Of adults. Of families. Of difference. Of the strange ways history continues living inside people.
And eventually, an observer becomes a storyteller.
“IS ART ENOUGH?”
WHY ART?
Shana had wanted to make films since she was young, but photography became the first formal language she learned as an artist.
During a summer in Ghana, that question became impossible to ignore. She found herself thinking about Walker Evans' Depression-era photographs of Alabama and looking at some of the same symbols of American consumer culture decades later.
What had changed?
If she was going to keep making art, she decided, she would have to spend her life trying to answer that question.
“Some things have a perfect ending.”
FINDING HOME, LOSING HOME
Shana and Nathan had made a home in York.
It was ancient and imperfect. The wiring sparked. Ceilings fell. The windows were so fragile you could practically push through them. Shana painted nearly every inch of the inside, again and again.
After they left York, the empty house burned down.
Years later, while cleaning an old dresser, she found a tiny piece of the house that had somehow fallen into a drawer.
Later she returned to York. The front steps remained. Goldenrod grew around them.
“It was that kind of house. A house that could accidentally come with you.”
SHANA BERGER
Shana believes art happens between people. Her ideal creative life is pursuing questions, using whatever medium fits them, and doing it collaboratively.
You've just seen what happens when people, places, ideas and resources come together around this artist. If you'd like to be part of what happens next, come in.
