Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, installation, mixed-media assemblage
Website: gnourtnart.com
Truong Tran was born in 1969 in Saigon, Vietnam, and emigrated with his family to the United States, settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. He earned a BA from UC Santa Cruz in 1992 and an MFA from San Francisco State University in 1995.
Tran first built his reputation as a poet, publishing five collections — including The Book of Perceptions (1999), a Kiriyama Prize finalist, and dust and conscience (2002), winner of the San Francisco State Poetry Center Prize — along with the children’s book Going Home, Coming Home (2003). His 2021 collection Book of the Other: small in comparison won an American Book Award in 2022. Around 2010, Tran began exhibiting visual art alongside his writing, debuting his first solo show, “the lost and the found,” at Kearny Street Workshop. He has since described himself as primarily a visual artist whose poetry is an “alter ego,” with both practices serving as ways of thinking through the consciousness of the times.
Tran lives and works in San Francisco, where he keeps a studio at the Pacific Felt Factory arts complex in the Mission District. He teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University, Mills College in Oakland, and Northeastern University. His visual art practice remains active, with a solo exhibition, “100 Nights of the Pandemic/100 Days of Yearning,” presented by Kearny Street Workshop at Arc Gallery & Studios in San Francisco in early 2026.
Tran builds his sculptures and installations from found materials — branches, thrift-store finds, and objects picked up off the sidewalk during daily walks through his San Francisco neighborhood. His process, in his own words, is direct and tactile: “I glue things together. I make things fit. I dip things in wax. I cut. I build. I weave.” Many pieces incorporate illumination, becoming what he has called “sculptures of light.” He has articulated his approach around four recurring ideas — containment, constraint, compulsion, and correlative — using the frame of a piece, self-imposed material limits, obsessive accumulation, and storytelling to bind an object to the person viewing it.
Running through the work is the sensibility of a poet: Tran is as interested in text as visual imagery as he is in the image as a form of language, and his sculptural practice carries over the same attention to repetition, constraint, and voice found in his writing. His most recent body of work, made after 100 nights spent shaping materials in darkness, extends this into a practice built on touch and sensory perception rather than sight.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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