Monique Wales

Monique Wales is an American printmaker born in 1965 and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area who lives and works in Oakhurst, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills about thirty minutes from Yosemite National Park's southern gate. She is largely self-taught, having worked as a digital artist in marketing for nearly twenty years before turning to printmaking full-time around 2012 and founding Red Tail Studios in the mountainside home and studio she and her husband built.

Wales is best known for her reductive linocut relief printmaking, and she has also taken up mokuhanga, the traditional Japanese water-based woodblock technique. In 2019 she completed a mokuhanga residency at MI-LAB (the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory) in Japan, deepening her practice in traditional Japanese woodblock printing.

Her nature-inspired work draws heavily on the mountain landscapes in and around her home near Yosemite. Her prints have earned a number of honors, including the Ironbridge Fine Arts Printmaker Prize at the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers' National Original Print Exhibition (NOPE) in 2019. She is represented by Mesh Art Gallery, among other galleries.