Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, weaving, performance, installation
Website: morganntrumbull.com/artists/35-charlene-tan
Charlene Tan (they/them) was born in Houston, Texas, and spent most of their childhood in the Philippines before returning to San Francisco for their education. They studied History and Theory of Contemporary Art, with a specialization in New Genres, at the San Francisco Art Institute. They live and work in San Francisco and are represented by Morgann Trumbull Projects. Their work is in the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). They have been an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito and at MassMoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. Their work was included in Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2023, where they organized a participatory workshop for visitors to co-create a large-scale weaving. They were a Space Program Artist in Residence at Minnesota Street Foundation in 2025.
Tan works across sculpture, weaving, performance, and installation, with a practice that investigates assimilation, consumer culture, post-colonial immigrant diaspora, and the digital loss of imagery via facsimile. Their recent work draws on their grandmother’s tradition of Filipino tribal weaving — a discovery that the grandmother was not only a tailor and embroiderer but had produced traditional Indigenous weavings — using this ancestral textile knowledge as a lens for examining cultural memory, displacement, and the transmission of knowledge across generations. An earlier strand of the practice used pharmaceutical packaging, silver mylar emergency blankets, and corporate materials as sculptural components, interrogating the aesthetics of consumer culture and the language of safety and comfort. Tan also works as a curator, organizing exhibitions and residency programs that support emerging and underrepresented artists.
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