William Harper was born in 1944 in Bucyrus, a small farm town in the center of Ohio. In 1962 he enrolled in a five-year program offered jointly by Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Art. He was awarded his bachelor of science (1966) and master of science (1967) degrees from Case Western Reserve with a certificate in teacher training and with advance work in enameling. While at the institute he studied with the enamelist Kenneth Bates whose mastery of all forms of enameling and commitment to technical refinement exerted an enormous influence on Harper. However, while there he was also exposed to a freer, more spontaneous approach to enameling in classes offered by Mary Ellen McDermott.

In 1966, while on vacation in New York, Harper first encountered the work of the enamelist June Schwarcz in an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (now the Museum of Arts and Design). Scwarcz’s highly unorthodox approach to object-making and enameling encouraged and reinforced Harper’s own experiments in the medium.

William Harper is best known for his cloisonné enamels – jewelry, objects, and wall-mounted panels – which present startling juxtapositions of rich color and finely executed form with found materials and more crudely fashioned elements.

Throughout his long and immensely productive career, William Harper has produced a rich variety of exquisitely crafted and powerfully evocative objects. Trained as a painter as well as an enamelist, he has, over the past forty years, created an extraordinary range of highly inventive three-dimensional forms – from chalices, rattles and talismans to boxes, jewelry, and sculptural installations. His objects often incorporate intricate enameled designs along with gold, wood, and various other precious and, in some cases, distinctly nonprecious, materials. In his work Harper creates a provocative dialogue between opposing principles: the beautiful and the commonplace, the opulent and the mundane, the public and the intimately personal.