Tiff Massey is an interdisciplinary artist from Detroit, Michigan. She holds an MFA in metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work, inspired by African standards of economic vitality, includes both large-scale and wearable sculptures, music and performance. Massey counts the iconic material culture of 1980’s hip-hop as a major influence in her jewelry. She uses contemporary observances of class and race through the lens of an African diaspora, combined with inspiration drawn from her experience in Detroit.
Tiff Massey is a 2015 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship awardee, as well as a two-time John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge winner, and the 2019 recipient of Art Jewelry Forum’s Susan Beech Mid-Career Artist Grant. Massey has participated in numerous international residencies including Red Bull in Detroit, Ideas City (in Detroit, Athens, Greece and Arles, France) hosted by The New Museum of New York and with the Volterra-Detroit Foundation in Volterra, Italy. Tiff Massey’s work has been widely exhibited in both national and international museums and galleries. In 2018 she performed for the first time as part of the Detroit-Berlin: One Circle festival at HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin.
The session with this speaker is powered by re:publica on Sequencer Tour, which is a lighthouse project of Wunderbar Together. We thank the German Federal Foreign Office for making this possible.