About Rebecca
Rebecca Waring-Crane is recognized for her installation and sculptural work. Shifting between intimate, personal reflections and socially engaged activism, Waring-Crane’s art examines personal and systemic trauma, always with a whisper of healing, a hit of hope.
Stepping into her identity as a working artist in mid-life, Waring-Crane exhibits in traditional galleries and also shows surprising art in unexpected spaces—a portrait dress on a public ferry, personal memories at a school of business, social justice work at a gift fair.
Collaboration and Exploration define Waring-Crane’s work from graduate school—at California State University, San Bernardino, where she completed her MFA in 2020—into the present. Taking up space with a range of media delights her as a maker, teacher, visual storyteller.
Waring-Crane grew up in Takoma Park, Maryland and holds a Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education, and a Masters in English and Communication. She has had home addresses in Beirut, Nairobi, South Bend, Indiana, and now Riverside, California where she shares a home and garden, but not her studio, with her kind and witty husband.
Artist Statement
Story is my medium.
Because the stories we tell ourselves inform how we move in the world, how we relate to ourselves and each other, I revisit and reshape the stories I’m telling myself as a way to understand and find the humanity in them—the humor, awkwardness, bravery, shame, kindness, grief. Mine. Yours. Ours.
Navigating the terrain of experience and memory, I make sculptural objects and installations that render internal stories as external. Each story, its tone, and the questions it raises for me, determines the materials I use.
My storytelling transforms familiar materials or objects a little, or a lot, to posit fresh perspective, thwart expectations, and challenge meaning: a measuring cup with markers erased; a torso that looks like marble, but that is really made of soap.
Believing that what is most personal is most universal, each work invites viewer reflection, asking Have you ever felt like this? And What is the story you’re telling yourself?
My hands-on, process-based work suggests multiple readings rather than clear conclusions. Whatever the story you tell yourself, I hope that seeing my stories reminds you that you are not alone.