Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Photography, video, film, sculpture, publication
Website: tammyraecarland.com
Tammy Rae Carland was born on January 27, 1965, in Portland, Maine, and lives and works in Oakland, California. She studied photography at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where in the late 1980s she co-founded the gallery Reko Muse with fellow student Kathleen Hanna and formed the band Amy Carter. She is represented by Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the KADIST Foundation, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the San Francisco International Airport Museum.
From 1997 to 2004 she co-founded and ran Mr. Lady Records and Videos, an independent record label and video distribution company dedicated to feminist and queer culture, which released recordings by The Butchies, Kaia Wilson, and Le Tigre. She produced influential fanzines including I ❤ Amy Carter in the 1990s, with contributors including Donna Dresch of Team Dresch. She collaborated on album art for Bikini Kill, The Fakes, and The Butchies, and is the namesake of the Bikini Kill song “For Tammy Rae.” Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, TIME Magazine, and the books Art & Queer Culture (Phaidon), Feeling Photography (Duke Press), 33 Artists in 3 Acts (Sarah Thornton), and The Riot Grrrl Collection (Feminist Press). She was Professor of Photography and Fine Arts and former Provost at the California College of the Arts. She was honored at BAMPFA’s 2023 Art & Film Benefit.
Carland works primarily in photography, alongside film, video, sculpture, collage, and publications, engaging with queer identity, intimacy, marginality, and cultural and domestic archives. She is a maker rather than a documentarian: her photographs are carefully staged, using the language of still life and portraiture to explore the affective and political dimensions of everyday queer life. Her best-known series include Lesbian Beds — photographs of unmade beds made in the homes of lesbian couples, which cite Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typological photography as a formal model — and An Archive of Feelings, a series of found photographs with handwritten texts on their backs (Photoback). A recurring subject is the stage: empty performance stages photographed as waiting, forlorn spaces, a series that began with her own drag performances in the late 1980s and was used for the cover of Bikini Kill’s Pussy Whipped. Her work looks at marginality as a fertile site for resistance as opposed to victimhood or disempowerment.
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