Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation, Ceramics
Website: tracyren.work
Tracy Ren is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and curator who spent eight years living and working in Oakland, California before earning a BFA cum laude in Ceramics from California College of the Arts in 2018. While based in the Bay Area, Ren built a practice spanning sculpture, installation, and photography, exhibiting widely across Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco and working as a ceramics studio technician at CCA before teaching art at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland.
Ren’s Bay Area exhibition history includes solo shows at Dream Farm Commons, Cone Shape Top, Mutual Stores, and the Graduate Theological Union, alongside inclusion in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ triennial Bay Area Now 9 (2023–2024), which highlighted artists working throughout the region’s nine counties. Ren also worked as an independent curator, organizing MATRIX at Root Division (2022) and co-curating Lost Objects at CTRL+SHFT (2020), both accompanied by their own curatorial essays. Early recognition included a Summer Fellowship from Anderson Ranch Arts Center (2018) and a Zellerbach Family Foundation Grant (2020).
In 2024, Ren began an MFA in Sculpture at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, continuing to build on the material and conceptual concerns developed during their Bay Area years. There they received the Maxwell/Hanrahan Materials Award (2025) and were nominated for the International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement Award (2025).
Ren works across sculpture, installation, and photography, collaborating with materials such as copper, clay, and woven fabric to build forms that “reach, spill, and sprawl through their contiguity with photographic images, language, and space.” Recurring concerns in the work are place, orientation, and belonging — what is carried forward and what is left behind in moments of arrival and departure — approached through an intuitive, research-driven process the artist describes as “a site to break bread with ghosts.”
Ren’s exhibited work, including altar-like sculptural assemblages and joss paper studies, draws on ritual and object-oriented visual language to explore inherited and reclaimed family history, identity, and gender, using abstraction to build what one curatorial statement called a practice of being “held by one another both within and across space and time.”
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