About

Contact: t.waite.santibanez@gmail.com

Tamara Santibañez is an interdisciplinary artist and oral historian living and working in Brooklyn. Their work is rooted in storytelling and the visual language of identity construction, exploring subcultural semiotics and the meanings we make from bodily adornment. Enlisting inanimate objects as stand-ins for human figures and relationships, Santibañez emphasizes the undulating exchange between power and vulnerability, otherness and assimilation, access and complicity. They approach the the body as a site for archiving and accessing personal and collective narratives, and view tattooing as a political intervention. As a queer and trans artist, their practice memorializes the language and resistance strategies used by “othered” populations to build and map alternative worlds.

In 2019 they were awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design and were a recipient of the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Grant. Their work has been exhibited at JTT Gallery, Selenas Mountain, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and in performance at MoMA PS1, among others. They are author of Could This Be Magic? Tattooing as Liberation Work (Afterlife Press) and the poetry chapbook Memory Lane (2024). They received their BFA from Pratt Institute in Printmaking and MA in Oral History from Columbia University, awarded OHMA’s Future Voices Fellowship for 2021, and were a recipient of Duke University’s 2024 DocX Fellowship: Otherwise Histories, Otherwise Futures.

@tamarasantibanez