Biography
Rena Tom is an artist, writer, and independent curator based in Berkeley, CA who works across photography, textiles, zines and artist’s books, and installation. She holds an MA in Critical Craft Studies from Warren Wilson College and dual degrees in English and Mechanical Engineering from UC Santa Barbara. Her curiosity about objects, making, and makers, as well as the spaces they inhabit, is the throughline spanning 20+ years as a craftsperson, designer, shopkeeper, gallerist, instructor, and event producer in San Francisco and Brooklyn.
Currently, Rena utilizes mundane objects, optical illusions, and found imagery as sites of discomfort to destabilize, question, and reframe everyday experience. She runs the micro-press Not Great, Not Terrible, participates in the Bay Area’s independent art and radical publishing scenes, and writes, produces, and performs in large-scale participatory art installations and the occasional pirate radio broadcast; this highly collaborative work informs her solo practice.
Statement
I have a weird fascination with discomfort. As a fourth generation Chinese American, my existence is privileged but my sense of belonging remains liminal: I am a perpetual outsider based on my appearance, resisting expectations to be a ‘model minority’. My feelings of uncertainty and grief propel explorations into seeming dichotomies including absence/presence, tangible/intangible, handmade/machine-made, and archival/ephemeral.
The conceptual nature of my research is anchored by the intimate, embodied aspects of craft. I investigate material and immaterial objects as sites where tensions play out to address personal and systemic issues of visibility, privacy, identity, and representation. Whether creating site-specific immersive environments, optical illusions with mirrors, or publications of found imagery, I propose alternative realities to reframe everyday experience and inspire generative critical thinking about the future.
CV
Recent Curatorial Projects
2025
How It Is Nowadays, Root Division, San Francisco, CA [forthcoming in November]
I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, 120710, Berkeley, CA
Recent Exhibitions and Installations
2025
I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, 120710, Berkeley, CA
Pyramid Scheme 2.0, Bass & Reiner, San Francisco, CA
Hanky Panky, installation, private art event, Upper Lake, CA
2025
How It Is Nowadays, Root Division, San Francisco, CA [forthcoming in November]
I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, 120710, Berkeley, CA
2025
I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, 120710, Berkeley, CA
Pyramid Scheme 2.0, Bass & Reiner, San Francisco, CA
Hanky Panky, installation, private art event, Upper Lake, CA