Location: Vallejo, CA
Medium: Painting, murals, illustration
Website: leahtumerman.com
Leah Tumerman is a painter, muralist, and arts educator based in Vallejo, California. She received a BFA in Studio Art and Education with a painting emphasis from Belmont University in 2005, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. After graduate school she redirected her practice toward public accessibility, securing her first public mural commission with the 49th Ward of Chicago — the beginning of a now fifteen-year career in public art. She has produced large-scale murals nationally and served as a guest artist and mural facilitator with the Toledo Arts Commission, La Scuola International School in San Francisco, and the Vallejo Unified School District.
Her awards include California Arts Council grants in 2022 and 2023, selection as a San Francisco Arts Commission StreetSmArts muralist (2020–2022), a Vermont Studio Center residency (2018), Visit Oakland Public Art grants (2017–2018), and selection to the DiRosa Center for Contemporary Art Biennial (2024). Her studio paintings have been exhibited in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Nashville, and are available through the gallery at dirosaart.org.
Tumerman constructs narrative scenes by working intuitively from under-paintings, watching for the emergence of figurative subject matter and editing toward an oblique finish. Reveling in the implied relationships between bodies — based on physical posture and placement alone — she abstracts the form to equalize and universalize. Her figures exist on a shared plane, found in physical communion, communicating in secret languages, forming anti-linear structures, or attending intentional gatherings. The boundaries between bodies are often purposefully unclear; this ambiguity is her definition of belonging. A body composed of color material is her pursuit of new flesh unburdened by collective misappropriation — isolated figures that explore the impossibility of singularity and the improbability of holiness. Text pieces enter her canvases as character vocalizations, off-stage insight, or a chorus’s response to the play at hand.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your profile.