Gene Tanta is a Romanian-born American artist and poet working across painting, poetry, translation, and public exchange. A two-time Fulbright grantee to Romania, he holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His work explores color, migration, memory, and the politics of language.

Are paintings available?

Selected paintings and works on paper may be available by inquiry. Availability changes as works move between the studio, exhibitions, collections, and ongoing bodies of work. For acquisitions, studio visits, or specific works, please send a note through the contact form.

Are prints and editions available?

Prints, editions, publications, and related studio works are developed selectively. Some works may be available directly, while others are offered by inquiry or through small-run releases. Editions extend the studio practice through forms that can circulate beyond a single exhibition or private collection.

Can I visit the studio?

Studio visits are available by request when there is a clear fit with the work. Curators, collectors, writers, educators, students, and collaborators are welcome to send a note through the contact form with a short description of the context and timing.

What is Found Art Studio?

Found Art Studio is the mobile physical studio and public-facing arm of Gene Tanta's practice. It gathers residencies, workshops, educational projects, access initiatives, studio visits, and temporary working sites under one flexible studio name. Instead of naming a single address, it names a way the work moves: through making, teaching, hosting, gathering, and exchange.

LogicHum.com is a separate project space for Gene Tanta's related digital work, including apps, games, tools, AI systems, and other interactive forms. GeneTanta.com remains the home for paintings, works on paper, books, editions, biography, CV, and the public-facing art practice.

Do you take commissions or collaborations?

Commissions and collaborations are considered when there is a strong fit with the work. This may include paintings, texts, educational projects, curatorial, editorial, games, or experimental projects developed in dialogue with a person, site, institution, or public context. The best inquiries are specific, open, and grounded in a real relationship to the work.

How should curators, collectors, or institutions reach out?

Curators, collectors, publishers, educators, and administrators are welcome to send a note through the contact form. For exhibitions, acquisitions, studio visits, commissions, workshops, speaking engagements, press, or institutional projects, please include a short note about the context, timeline, and nature of the inquiry.

How Do You Say "Patronizing"? | Gene Tanta, Solo Exhibition, Timișoara 2023

There is no word for “patronizing” in Romanian. I grew up feeling the tone before I could name it—the way care slips into control, or affection slides into humiliation. When language fails you, the body becomes the record.

These works draw from the everyday commands, jokes, warnings, and diminishments that shaped me and the generations around me. Painted, stenciled, sprayed, or lifted from walls and workshops in Timișoara, each phrase carries a double edge: warmth and discipline, intimacy and shame.

The phrases appear as they are lived—often without the diacritical marks of formal Romanian, in the spelling of someone who left and returned. The misspellings remain.

By giving these phrases form, I’m trying to understand them. By naming them, I’m trying to change their power.

How Do You Say Patronizing? is a text-based painting and stencil series about Romanian language, migration, internal censorship, and the way everyday speech turns insecurity into power.