Lani Asher is an artist, art critic, curator, and art teacher. She was raised in Los Angeles’s rambling San Fernando Valley famous for strip malls and freeways. She attended the College of Creative Studies at University of California Santa Barbara and chose this school because there were no grades, and it was near the ocean. At CCS James Turrell took the students flying in his private plane, John McCraken tried to teach his students to levitate, and the teachers took the fledgling artist to meet artists in their studios in downtown Los Angeles. After college she lived in New York, teaching art to elders, working in an erotic bakery, and attended NYU and the Visual Studies Workshop. The now defunct San Francisco Art institute begrudgingly awarded her an MFA in the New Genders department on the cusp of the digital revolution. She has had residencies in Wyoming, New Mexico, Vermont, and Mexico, taught for many Bay Area nonprofits, and has written for digital publications Art Practical, delicious line, and SF Arts Quarterly. Lani Asher finds refuge in her studio is in the industrial part of San Francisco where she makes paper-based collages constructed with photographs, painting, and drawings, joined together on the reverse side with rice paper and glue. Recycled paper fragments generated by her studio practice are quilted together loosely structured on grids or rectangles. The delicate surfaces are built up with layers of paint, pencil, and paper, giving the collages a tactile and sculptural dimension.