Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Social practice, photography, collage, installation
Website: omfrancestudio.com
O.M. France Viana is a visual artist, art historian, curator, and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Born and raised in Manila, Philippines, she studied art in Switzerland and Spain before relocating to California, where she earned a BA in Art History and an MFA in Studio Art from Mills College in Oakland. Her thesis work was shown in the 12 Degrees MFA exhibition at the Mills College Art Museum in 2017, for which she received the Hung Liu Prize for studio art excellence.
Viana works across social artistry, photography, collage, and installation, describing herself as “a conceptualist with roots in art history.” Her practice centers on how Filipinx immigration is redefining what it means to be American, drawing on the animism, folk religion, and shamanism that underlie mainstream Catholic practice in the Philippines. She frequently uses Filipino food — most notably the purple yam, or ube — as both subject and medium, treating it as metaphor for diaspora, cultural identity, and what she has described as “agents of reverse colonization.” Related themes in her work include kayumanggi, the caramel skin tone associated with Filipino identity, and the color black as a sacred marker.
Beyond studio work, Viana is active as a curator and community organizer. She founded and runs ARROZidency, an artist residency program supporting Filipino American artists, and previously founded Diviana Gallery in Manila, described as the city’s first fine art photography gallery. In the Bay Area she has served as a Commissioner at the Asian Art Museum and as a member of the arts and culture committee for SOMA Pilipinas, San Francisco’s designated Filipino cultural heritage district, where she has staged site-specific interventions and performances.
Viana’s work has been shown at the Mills College Art Museum (12 Degrees, 2017), SOMArts Cultural Center as a Murphy Cadogan Fellowship awardee, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (Ube Trade, 2018), Asia Society Houston (Super Sarap, 2019), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (Pistahan Pilipino, 2017), and the Marin Civic Center (Friendly Tides, 2023). She received an Honorable Mention in the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art’s Summer National Juried Exhibition in 2012, and was named one of the “100 Most Influential Filipina Women in the U.S.” by the Filipina Women’s Network.
More on her work can be found at her website, omfrancestudio.com.