Tanya marcuse biography

Tanya Marcuse – Fruitless | Fallen | Woven

My parents divorced in 1976, during my first weeks of kindergarten. My memories of that time are fuzzy, but I do remember a t-shirt my mom wore as an expression of her new identity after her life with my dad. It was a yellow cotton shirt with a red stencil of an apple with one bite taken out, alongside the words Eve was framed. Clearly, at 6 I didn’t understand the bold iconoclasm of it, but I did notice she got lots of comments the time she donned it for a trip to the neighborhood greenhouse. Today I understand it as a brash feminism I admire, and I interpret it as really asking an essential question, would the story of Eden be the same if Eve wrote it instead of Adam or the Father?

In looking through the 2019 publication by photographer Tanya Marcuse, I find myself asking the same question. Fruitless/Fallen/Woven, published by David Chickey and Radius Books, is a as expressive as it is masterful. The photographs are built on a unique knowledge of art history, a deep love of the landscape, and an insatiable curiosi

Participant Biographies

Tanya Marcuse is an American artist most known for her large-scale photographs investigating the imperiled natural world in elaborately constructed tableau. She studied Art History and Studio Art at Oberlin and earned her MFA from Yale. Tanya’s photographs are in many collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art and the George Eastman Museum. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter S. Reed Grant and two MacDowell Fellowships. Tanya’s books include Undergarments and Armor (Nazraeli Press, 2005), Wax Bodies, (Nazraeli Press, 2012), Fruitless | Fallen | Woven (Radius Press, 2019) and Ink (Fall Line Press (2021). Tanya is a student of martial arts and boxing as a method of cultivating mental and physical concentration and discipline. She is based in the Hudson Valley, NY and teaches Photography at Bard College.

Steven Siegel has been making large scale, sited sculpture since the 1980’s. He has installed dozens of pieces throughout Europe, the United States, Asia

Nº 10b (Part 1 Kingdom) Book of Miracles

62 x 124” 2023

Tanya Marcuse, began Book of Miracles during the lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic. The project has unfolded against the backdrop of wildfires, extreme temperatures, political and social upheaval, and reflects the increasing strangeness and instability of our world.  The project aims to visualize phenomena that defy the laws of nature, using fire, paint, and the staging of fantastical scenes.  

Marcuse’s primary reference for the project is the 16th-century Augsburg Wunderzeichenbuch (Signs and Wonders, or the Book of Miracles), an illustrated compendium of biblical, astronomical, and apocalyptic wonders and omens. Photography often walks a thin line between fact and fiction, or dwells in a realm where the two cannot be distinguished;  Marcuse's work embraces this ambiguity, and invites viewers into an expanded sense of the possible, the believable, and even the real. 

Book of Miracles consists of three parts done at different scales and employing distinct methods: 

Part

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