Location: Emeryville, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation, Performance, Photography, Video
Website: torreya.info
Torreya Cummings is a project-based interdisciplinary visual artist raised in Sloughhouse in California’s Central Valley. They studied ceramics and photography at UC Davis before earning an MFA in sculpture from California College of the Arts in 2009. They have lived and worked in the Bay Area for many years, currently based in Emeryville, CA, and also hold a position as Associate Director of Academic Computing and Studio Operations at California College of the Arts.
Cummings has received significant institutional recognition for their practice. They were a Bay Area Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts from 2021 to 2023 and were twice nominated for the SFMOMA SECA Award. Their work has been commissioned and exhibited at major Bay Area venues including the Oakland Museum of California, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts. The Creative Work Fund (a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund) supported their 2025–2026 collaboration with Sarah Lowe at the Berkeley Art Center.
Cummings creates immersive, multisensory environments that investigate ideas of place, time, and historical narrative — particularly the dominant narratives of the American West. Their methods include research, photography, sculpture, installation, performance, video, drag aesthetics, poor substitutions, hardware store materials, theater tricks, bad illusions, props, sets, dioramas, and the language of interpretive sites. A recurring thread across their projects is the double vision that occurs when a viewer can believe an illusion while simultaneously seeing how it is constructed, holding contradictions — urban and rural, gay and straight, natural and artificial — in productive tension.
Queerness functions in their work less as an explicit subject than as an orientation and approach: a lens through which to question what gets represented, how historical authority is constructed, and what unlearning those narratives might open up. Projects typically begin with a specific location or historical event and move through deep research before shifting into synthesis or fiction grounded in fact.
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