Tanya Aguiñiga

Tanya Aguiñiga (b. 1978) is a Los Angeles-based artist/designer/craftsperson who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. In her formative years, she created various collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop, an artists’ group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art. Her current work uses craft as a performative medium to generate dialogues about identity, culture, and gender while creating community.

Aguiñiga is a 2022 Latinx Artist Fellow, a recipient of the 26th annual Heinz Award, a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts, a NALAC Grant Recipient, and a Creative Capital 2016 Grant Awardee. She is the inaugural fellow for Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. She has been the subject of numerous articles in American Craft Magazine and has been featured in Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century, KCET’s Artbound, and PBS’s Craft in America Series.

Aguiñiga is the founder and director of AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of artist interventions and commuter collaborations that address bi-national transition and identity in the US/Mexico border regions. AMBOS seeks to create a greater sense of interconnectedness while simultaneously documenting the border.

Recent museum exhibitions include Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living as part of AMBOS at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, Hella Feminist at the Oakland Museum of California, the 2022 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, LatinXAmerican at the DePaul Art Museum, Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational 2018 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., and Craft and Care at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Her work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Decorative Arts collection and Contemporary Arts collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and The Mint Museum in Charlotte.