TC Kida(TC Kida)(@kidatsy)

Premier

Seattle, WA

TC Kida (she/they) is a shin-nisei Japanese-American collage artist based in Seattle, WA. She studied art at Yale University, concentrating in graphic design and graduating with a BA in 2005. She started working with collage as part of her design education and was immediately hooked by its ability to interrogate and synthesize new meanings out of what were previously disparate elements. Since then, TC’s life has taken many personal and career transitions, including work as a graphic designer, carpenter, software engineer, and grassroots organizer. She consistently strives to apply the techniques and perspectives she has honed throughout those experiences, repurposing a wide range of found materials and reassembling them into socially impactful work. As a trans woman of color, she is deeply committed to social justice, proudly constructing new spaces for exploring the identities she carries at the intersections of existence and resistance.

Artistic Categories

Genres

Collage

Mediums

—

Styles

Abstract Pop Art Surrealism

Find me online

Images

Galleries

Artist Statement

Collage has long been an art form of the disenfranchised and the dispossessed, and I most appreciate its ability to synthesize a new reality out of the pieces of the old. I am growing a new hybrid visual language mapping the embodiment of the identities and histories I hold as a queer, trans-femme shin-nisei Japanese-American, subverting the unspoken narratives, assumptions, and expectations of race, class, and gender that are embedded throughout the hegemonic Western world. I am interested in the borderlands, the intersections, the places where the containers we’ve built to define ourselves become untenable, and new combinations are made possible. By reappropriating this material, I aim to help construct a new plane of dignity and acceptance from the margins of a system that is increasingly being engineered to eradicate from public life immigrants, trans folks, people of color, and anybody else holding a marginalized identity.