Joan Tanner (b.1935) is a California–based artist who has been making rigorously experimental work for more than six decades. Born in Indianapolis, in 1935, she received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1957. She has lived and worked in Santa Barbara since 1965.

 

Over many decades, Tanner’s work has developed across disciplines to encompass many media, including painting, drawing, photography, video, sculpture, and assemblage. Actively exhibiting since the mid 1960s, she has employed complexity and contradiction as ongoing themes in her work—beginning with her early paintings which juxtaposed geometric forms with organic compositional elements in order to disrupt their precision. In the 1980s she began to work in three dimensions, exploring the potential of collage, leading to an eventual fascination with large scale installations that reflect her ceaseless commitment to material exploration and experimentation.

 

In the early 1990s, Tanner ceased painting with a desire to explore more complex sculptural forms. In her 1995 exhibition Close Scrutiny, at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, she used organic objects—such as apples pierced with nails and pins—that would gradually decay and ossify over a period of months or years, stating, “I was interested in the idea of display and the possibility of change, taking objects apart, doing things related to sequencing, and exposing rawness or awkwardness.”

 

Subsequently, she began to incorporate a plethora of found objects in her sculptures and to homogenize them, dipping and coating materials in Plasti Dip, a rubber coating frequently used to protect surfaces like tools, car parts, and domestic items. More recently, though, she has become known for creating impressive installation works, designed in response to specific sites. Employing found, common, raw, and industrial materials, they fill whole gallery spaces in a seemingly precarious and makeshift assemblage of cascading and tumbling forms that, like poetic, three-dimensional montages, unfold as reflections on development and decay. “When I was painting in the 1960s and ’70s, I was interested in simple geometric forms, things like windows and boxes. I painted ropes that were coiled and twisted. Now, I am doing the same thing, one could say, with physical materials, which has to do with stuffing and bulging, and then twisting, inserting, screwing, and bolting.” Manipulating objects that are both ordinary and accessible remains central to Tanner, who cites a myriad of influences, including Kurt Schwitters’ “nonchalant use of materials,” the politically charged Arte Povera movement, as well as the variety of Martin Kippenberger’s practice.

 

Throughout her career, the act of drawing has remained a central and consistent thread, grounding Tanner’s practice to her origins as a painter. Importantly, her works on paper are not preparatory sketches but, rather, autonomous enquiries, realized in charcoal, latex paint, oil stick metallic powder, graphite, and ink. In these often large scale works, dense accumulations of marks and gestures suggest maps, archeology, architecture, and cellular elements. Some look archaic or topographic while others are more minimal “almost like an empty page in a book.” Her drawings, however, are not illustrations but intuitive explorations of the potential of space and form. This is not to say that they are vague or unintentional but, rather, that Tanner’s focus is on the ambiguities and contradictions that pervade her imagery. Lines flicker and collide, bend back on themselves; forms move toward coherence only to break apart. The page becomes a site of rehearsal—not preparation, but re-possession of a problem: How does a structure hold together? When does it fail? What is the threshold between balance and collapse?

 

The open-endedness of Tanner’s drawings relates to her large-scale sculptures and installations in that they seem purposefully resistant to resolution. Yet this resistance is precisely what makes Tanner’s work vital now. In a culture increasingly defined by frictionless surfaces and seamless images, she insists on the consequences of matter: weight, tension, repair, endurance. Her work addresses how structures—architectural, social, psychological—hold together, fail, and are rebuilt. Tanner’s practice is ultimately about the condition of being in space—with uncertainty, complexity, and the possibility of transformation. Her work reminds us that making is a form of staying alive to the world: attentive, resourceful, and defiantly open to change.

 

Now 90 years old, Tanner maintains an active studio practice. She has presented significant solo exhibitions at Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College, Los Angeles; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Suyama Space, Seattle; The Speed Art Museum, Louisville KY; Fresno Art Museum; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

 

Her work is held in numerous private and public collections including: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Special Collections; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Harvard University, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphics, Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York Public Library, Spencer Collection, New York City, NY; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California.

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Over the years, she has also been a visiting lecturer at the University of California Santa Barbara, Ohio University in Athens, Illinois State University at Normal, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.