Tanya Crane
she/her
Providence, RI, USA
Tanya Crane is a Southern California native who now resides in Providence, Rhode Island where she works as both a studio jeweler and professor of jewelry and metalsmithing at the School Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts.
“Crane’s work embodies the many layers of human existence. These include history, race, class, and culture. Coming from the perspective of an African American woman, she uses community and inclusiveness as a magnetic beacon to diversify and expand ideas, understandings, and codifications. Enamel and metal are her main mediums, which she uses to provide the framework for cultural collisions and collaboration.”
What does being queer mean to you in relation to your material choices? Is it something you consider?
“Requiring the viewer to take a second look, or to reconsider their value systems is where the objects I create intersect."
"What's His Worth", Steel, enamel, 23kt gold leaf, 12" x 10" x 8", 2022Is the work queer because the maker is queer, or is it queer because the subject matter is queer?
“To queer is to make odd. To tell someone to rethink or reconsider their stance."
Anything else you would like to share about this work? This can be an important part of the process, sourcing materials, or research.
“My father had ALS, a degenerative nervous system disease that rendered him paralyzed and ended his life in his late 40’s. Through a series of ongoing recorded interviews with family members, I am trying to capture the essence of my father. These stories are emerging in both jewelry and enameled vessels that are direct responses to my desire to know my father through the optics of those who knew him. What's His Worth? speaks to his multiple incarcerations, and ultimately his bodily incarceration. The urinal, a strictly utilitarian object, presents a reductionary assessment of worth; the only acts at the end of his life were fundamental to basic survival and even lacking in basic dignity. The tick marks mark time spent incarcerated in prison as well as the bodily prison he spent the last of his days in. The gold on the inside is a metaphor for a standard of worth that was maybe never seen or never actualized; its presence informs the viewer that it indeed existed."