Tani, Diane

Diane Tani is an Asian American artist who works with photography to address issues of identity, stereotypes, and the reinterpretation of history. She participated in Women’s Work, a community-based arts program designed to draw attention to issues of concern to women and their families, developed by Y-Core, Chicago, for Liz Claiborne Corporation. With the goals of raising awareness about domestic violence and helping communities respond to the needs of its victims, Women’s Work featured powerful and instructive images by Diane Tani, Barbara Kruger, Susan Meiselas, Carrie Mae Weems, and Jon Winet and Margaret Crane. The work was shown in San Francisco and Oakland, CA, bus shelters and billboards. Diane Tani’s contribution to the project uses statistics paired with a photograph of a child to highlight the link between domestic abuse and child abuse, as well as the cyclical nature of learned behavior. Her contribution was translated into Chinese and Korean to raise awareness in monolingual and bilingual Asian American communities. She co-authored the publication, With New Eyes: Toward an Asian American Art History (San Francisco State University, 1995).