: Nancy Haver

Nancy Haver began her illustration career working primarily as a scientific illustrator and eventually branched out to do editorial illustration of newspapers and books, mural work and commissioned artwork. She is a co-owner of Collective Copies, print shops in Amherst and Florence, Massachusetts. Haver has exhibited her work at a variety of venues, including the Springfield Art Museum, Westfield State College, Holyoke Community College, R. Michelson Galleries, Northampton Center for the Arts, the DeCordova Museum and Worthington Gallery, UT. She taught drawing, illustration, and relief printmaking at the University of Massachusetts and Holyoke Community College for twelve years and has taught the same subjects privately. Haver tries to spend as much time as possible outdoors, and enjoy hiking, bicycling, jogging, ukulele and tap dancing. After growing up in Indiana and living in southern California, she is happy to be a long-time resident of the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts.

“From atop Mt Skinner, the Holyoke Range is no longer the cut-out silhouette that frames most of my days. It ripples and unfolds in every direction; its cliffs and high points are dramatic basalt formations that cleave over time into angular sculptures and “jingle rock.” Below is the shimmering river that is Northampton’s eastern border, the southern roll of hills that embrace the town, and the cast-off Oxbow. It is, in the words of John Muir, nature “chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.”