Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Installation, Collage, Assemblage
Website: tanyahollis.com
Tanya Hollis (b. 1970, Connecticut) is a San Francisco-based artist who has lived and worked in the city since 1999. Raised on the Treasure Coast of Florida, she spent time in New York and Buffalo before settling in the Bay Area, where she became a central figure in its experimental arts and literary communities. She is a co-founder and co-operator of Right Window Gallery on Valencia Street in San Francisco, a collectively run space she has helped sustain alongside eleven other artists. Hollis also works as an archivist and Collections Management Team Lead at the Labor Archives and Research Center, J. Paul Leonard Library, San Francisco State University—a role she has held since 2011 and that deeply informs her artistic practice.
Her work has been exhibited across the Bay Area as well as in Los Angeles and Portland, and her visual art has been published in architecture magazines and numerous literary and art publications. Her publications include contributions to Tripwire: a journal of poetics and cover art for presses such as Nightboat Books, Belladonna, Factory School, and Krupskaya, placing her practice in ongoing dialogue with Bay Area poetry and experimental writing communities.
Hollis works primarily through décollage, assemblage, and installation, treating archival deterioration—lifted text, paper erosion, fragmented context—as creative material rather than loss. Her assemblages draw on found fragments of scientific journals, newsprint, bureaucratic forms, and other evidence of official record-keeping, treating history as “an assemblage of positive object-facts” and investigating the gaps and fissures in archival practice itself. This approach grows from an early fascination with dioramas and the constructed nature of historical display, manifest in scaled landscapes, vitrines, and altered manuscripts.
Her ongoing PARCH series pivots toward landscape and climate, responding to California’s cycles of drought and fire. Working with plaster, steel, carbon, and salt on wood panels, Hollis floods each panel with water repeatedly, allowing natural fissures and cracks to form as the surface dries. The resulting relief works function as landscape abstractions, legible from multiple vantage points—from a distance and from below—articulating what she describes as the “intensity and terror of cataclysmic change” etched into the California landscape with alarming speed.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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