Artist Statement
Toisha Tucker is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist and writer. Their work explores three often-overlapping veins of critique. They use art as a mode of cultural organizing, illuminating social constructions of gender, race, and identity. They posit incisive critiques of contemporary and historical events of Western society. They delve into the anthropomorphic relationship between technology and humans, contemporary dystopia, and human empathy. Their practice is process and research-based and manifests through text-based prints, photographs, video, participatory works, sculptural installations, analog and virtual physical labor, crafting, repetition, social practice, and other media that aim to directly engage with the body and critical thinking. Tucker’s work reflects their deep desire for precision in material, firsthand experiential evidence, and fabrication that conveys these elements. Many of their pieces are ongoing and mutable.
Biography
Toisha Tucker is a conceptual artist and writer. They hold a BA in Philosophy and History with a concentration in English Literature from Cornell University, a Post Baccalaureate in Visual Arts with distinction from UC Berkeley Extension, completed additional coursework at SAIC, and received their MFA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Design.
Tucker’s notable awards include a 2024 NEA Fellowship at VCCA, 2021 NYC Artist Corps Grant, a 2020 Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO, the 2018-2019 Alice C. Cole Fellowship at Wellesley College, and a 2013 Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.
They received a mention in New York Magazine’s approval matrix – highbrow, brilliant (US, September 2023) for their solo show, It’s a most peculiar sensation; or that time Virginia Woolf wore Blackface. They participated in METRO’s Privacy in Public exhibit on data privacy hosted across three boroughs in nine branches of the New York Public Library system and the Code, Craft and Catalogues: Arts in the Libraries series at the Finnish Cultural Institute. They participated in Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA) presents: Institutional Papers at Wendy’s Subway. Their short fiction After Jacob’s Room was the inaugural literary centerpiece for the revival edition of the Vassar Review in 2016. They are included in nonsensical’s first guest-edited issue, Words on Paper. Their work, Orlando/Violets, was part of Los Angeles Review of Books’ Voluble and Dikeou Lit: Virginia Woolf Dikeou Literary Series. They co-curated the exhibition #PERSIST in 2017 and curated the exhibition Diasporic Dysplasia, which opened at BRAC in 2022. Their work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Rosendale, Omaha, Catskill, Denver, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Verona. Tucker is a member of the Society of Fellows of the American Academy in Rome and has been in residence at Bemis, ACRE, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Marble House Project, Baldwin for the Arts, KODA, Wave Hill, and VCCA.
