Tanya Aguiñiga

Tanya Aguiñiga holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. Her current work uses craft as a performative medium to generate dialogues about identity, culture, and gender while creating community. 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. 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. Aguiñiga is a 2024 Center for Craft Catalyst Award Recipient, a 2023 Loewe Craft Prize finalist, 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.

Recent museum exhibitions include m\other at The Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA, Border Fall Height at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA, Sangre de Nopal/Blood of the Nopal: Tanya Aguiñiga & Porfirio Gutiérrez en Conversación/in Conversation at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, Intertwined: Weaving in Community at the Sun Valley Museum of Art, Ketchum, ID, In the Shadow of the Wall at Kimball Art Center, Park City, UT, Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living as part of AMBOS at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, A More Perfect Union: American Artists and the Currents of Our Time curated by U.S. Art in Embassies, This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C., Hella Feminist at the Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA, the 2022 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA, LatinXAmerican at the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL, 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, NY. Her work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, DePaul Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Oakland Museum of California, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Smithsonian American Art Museum and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Mint Museum in Charlotte, and The Wichita Art Museum.