Tanya Crane (USA)
Tanya Crane
Biography:
Tanya Crane is a Southern California native living and working in Providence, Rhode Island. She is a Professor of the Practice in Metals at the School Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. Crane’s work is framed within a dual existence of prejudice and privilege having adapted to life amongst family in both the white suburbs and the urban center of South Central, Los Angeles. Craft has become a conduit between these two worlds and has provided me the framework in which my current work is centered.
Crane was the 2018 SNAG Emerging Artist selected to present at SOFA Chicago, the 2017 recipient of the Society of Arts and Crafts Artist Award, a Haystack Mountain School Artist Residency 2017 recipient, and a participant in the Smitten Forum Metalsmithing Residency at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico 2018. She exhibited her work in a solo exhibition, Tributaries: Polarity, Exposing the Tensity, at the National Ornamental Metal Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. Crane's work is in the collection of the Stewart Program for Modern Design in Montreal, Canada and the Metal Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.
Collection Concept: Terra Infirma
In this three-person collective, Tanya Crane, Liz Clark and Jennifer Wells are making works that are exploring the implications of geographical displacement. Based on the book by author Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma where contemporary art challenges issues of identity and belonging, the collective pieces interpret identity through flora, landscape and collection. While each artist has a personal history of belonging/un-belonging, immigration, and displaced cultural identity, Crane, Clark and Wells make work as a meditative act. Crane uses repetitive tick marks in enamel as markers for time, Clark repeatedly saws and rivets flowers to invoke tenderness influenced by impermanence, and Wells uses wire that undulates and swirls just as vines hold on to a branch representing new growth and change.
