Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation, Drawing
Website: westonteruya.com
Weston Teruya was born in 1977 in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. He earned a BA in Studio Art with a minor in Asian American Studies from Pomona College in 1999, then moved to the Bay Area to complete dual master’s degrees at California College of the Arts in 2007, an MFA in Painting and Drawing and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies. He has lived and worked in Oakland since.
Alongside his studio practice, Teruya built a long career in arts administration, spending eight years as a Program Associate with the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Community Investments program and serving as a Commissioner on the Berkeley Civic Arts Commission from 2013 to 2016. In 2009 he co-founded Related Tactics with Michele Carlson and Nate Watson, a collective of artists, curators, educators, and writers of color that examines race, culture, and public memory through exhibitions, publications, and collaborative studio projects. He has also curated exhibitions at Berkeley Art Center, Southern Exposure, and Kearny Street Workshop.
Teruya’s recognitions include an Artadia Award (2009), a de Young Museum artist-in-residence position (2017), a Kala Art Institute Fellowship (2017), an Asian Cultural Council Individual Fellowship (2018) supporting research in Vietnam, a Rainin Fellowship for Public Space (2023), a Kenneth Rainin Foundation Open Space grant (2025), and residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts and, in 2025, the Ma Umi residency program on Ishigaki Island, Okinawa.
Teruya works primarily in paper-based sculpture, drawing, video, and installation, reconfiguring familiar symbols and forms — including culturally rooted celebratory objects like festival lanterns and papier-mâché — into new arrangements that probe power, control, visibility, and protection. His projects are frequently research-driven, drawing on archival photography, readings, and site history to trace how social movements and cross-racial solidarity are memorialized and transformed over time.
More recently his work has turned toward islands — including his own family’s history in Okinawa — as sites of anti-imperial resistance, cross-cultural exchange, environmental change, and embedded memory. Through Related Tactics, he also works collaboratively, inviting other artists of color into shared research and studio processes that surface institutional inequities, as in the collective’s project examining the demographics of the studio glass field.
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