Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Textiles, Mixed Media
Website: tanaquincyarcega.com
Tana Quincy Arcega (b. 1977, Nebraska) is a San Francisco–based artist working at the intersection of painting, textiles, and material reclamation. She holds a BFA in painting and sculpture from the University of Nebraska and an MFA in figurative painting from the New York Academy of Art. Rooted in San Francisco’s Mission district, Arcega has exhibited throughout the Bay Area and nationally, and is represented by re.riddle gallery at Minnesota Street Project.
Arcega’s practice grew out of classical figurative training but shifted as physical constraints prompted her to develop alternative mark-making approaches and to work with industrial, utilitarian, and found materials. She has worked professionally as a children’s book illustrator, muralist, and educator, teaching studio art at museums, colleges, and community programs for many years, including a partnership with the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
Her work investigates sustainability, care, and the potential of discarded or overlooked materials. She describes her guiding philosophy as “scrappiness”—an approach that is simultaneously personal and political, transforming fragments of textile, garment patterns, and remnant materials into abstract compositions that speak to resilience and resourcefulness. A public conversation with designer and educator Lynda Grose in 2023 at Minnesota Street Project explored these themes in depth.
Arcega’s process is wide-ranging and process-driven. She employs mouth painting, sewing, and extrusion painting, working with materials that include cotton fabric, thread, burlap, graphite, gouache, spackle, HDPE mesh, polypropylene, and PVC mesh. Her paintings re-examine the use of utilitarian and industrial materials from the vantage point of a trained painter: substrate and surface interact to produce work that is as much about material behavior as about composition and image.
Her work has been described as practicing “material rhyming,” where fragmented textiles and found objects coalesce into layered visual landscapes. Through what curators have called “upside-down consumerism,” she recasts waste as a source of aesthetic and inherent value, positioning material transformation as both a personal practice and an ethical stance. Her 2023 series Spirit of Scrappiness exemplifies this approach: remnant textiles and garment patterns are stitched into abstract forms that map care, identity, and time.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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