Arrowmont Connections: Tanya Crane uses her jewelry to raise money for racial justice
July 19, 2020
Arrowmont is a special community full of creative people – a family who know that coming together and making art is important. We talk a lot about the Arrowmont Experience – connecting through craft and community. That connection exists beyond physical proximity. It is in shared memories and new ideas. It lives in the friendships we make with each other. It grows when we learn and support one another.
Whether on campus or off, we are connected as members of the Arrowmont family. Over the next few weeks, we are going to share stories from our community of instructors, residents, and students in a new series, Arrowmont Connections.
Tanya Crane received her MFA in metalsmithing + jewelry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015, and her BFA in metal from the State University of New York at New Paltz. Currently, Crane is a Professor of the Practice in metals at the School Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. She is the 2018 SNAG Emerging Artist selected to present at SOFA Chicago, the 2017 recipient of the Society of Arts and Crafts Artist Award, and the Haystack Mountain School Artist Residency 2017, and the Smitten Forum Metalsmithing Residency at the Ghost Ranch in New Mexico 2018. Her first solo exhibition, Tributaries: Polarity, exposing the tensity, opened January, 2019 at the Metal Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.
Tanya will be returning as an Arrowmont instructor in 2021.
Tanya’s artwork dwells within a liminal existence between prejudice and privilege.
Reared in a white middle class suburb of Los Angeles, Crane’s experience with blackness was limited to visiting her father in South Central Los Angeles. Her dual existence has deeply informed her practice and has led to four distinct bodies of work, A Gathering of Instance, African and American, Seeing Through, and Polarity, Exposing the Tensity.
In recent weeks,
Tanya has contributed her jewelry to a number of fundraisers and raffles benefitting organizations that promote racial justice for Black, indigenous, and people of color
– including Crafting The Future, a nonprofit supporting the careers of young, underrepresented artists by connecting them to opportunities that will help them thrive. A recent raffle Tanya contributed to raised over $2,100.
Tanya will join Arrowmont July 22, 2020, 12:00 – 1:00 EST for the first Instructor Roundtable discussion with fellow Arrowmont instructors whose diverse work also explores the theme of IDENTITY.
She will be joined by:
- Salvador Jiménez-Flores, interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Chicago
- Leslie Pearson, multimedia artist in Fayetteville, NC
- Heinrich Toh, printmaker and educator in Kansas City
Click here to register as an attendee for the July Roundtable, or visit https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dJA1kajvRm-N0VjZ8GsDFQ.
Tanya Crane’s website: https://www.tanyamoniquejewelry.com/
Find more links and videos on Tanya’s Arrowmont Connections profile: https://www.arrowmont.org/instructor/tanya-crane-connections/
