Biography
Rena Tom is a multidisciplinary artist-researcher, curator, and instigator. Her curiosity about objects, making, and makers, as well as the spaces they inhabit, has been present throughout twenty years’ experience as a craftsperson, designer, writer, editor, shopkeeper, gallerist, publisher, instructor, and event producer in San Francisco and Brooklyn.
More recently, while continuing to explore the relationship between craft and social dynamics, she also writes, produces, and performs in large-scale, participatory art installations and the occasional pirate radio broadcast. This highly collaborative work, grounded in craft history and theory, informs her solo practice. She lives and works in Berkeley, CA, runs the micro-press Not Great, Not Terrible, and participates in the local independent art and radical publishing scenes.
Statement
I have a weird fascination with discomfort. As a third generation Chinese American, my existence is privileged but sense of belonging remains liminal: I am a perpetual outsider based on my appearance, engaged in resisting expectations to be a ‘model minority’. I use my feelings of uncertainty and grief to 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.
Upcoming Curatorial Projects
How It Is Nowadays, group exhibition, Root Division, San Francisco, CA [forthcoming in November 2025]
I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, group exhibition, 120710, Berkeley, CA [forthcoming in June 2025]
Selected Publications and Interviews