Joan Tanner
One of the most intriguing thinkers in Santa Barbara, Joan Tanner took the sculptural materials used in her studio and explored the textures of metal, rubber, wood and wire as drawing elements pressed into paper.


Joan Tanner
Works on paper
Born in 1935 in Indianapolis, Joan Tanner has lived in Southern California since the mid-1960s. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1957 and began her career as a painter. She has been consistently exhibiting her paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture and site-specific installations since 1968.

Tanner maintains a vigorous studio practice somewhat akin to a laboratory and is inspired by spatial contradictions, archetypal geometric forms and raw materials. Her work is held in a number of private and corporate collections and in the following public collections: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Special Collections; Harvard University, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphics, Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York Public Library, Spencer Collection; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California. Over the years, Tanner has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California Santa Barbara, Ohio University in Athens, Illinois State University at Normal, and most recently she was an artist-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.