Tamera Avery

Tamera Avery is a San Francisco-based painter whose current series, Off The Rails, tackles the weighty question: How will future generations respond to the lack of control in our present world? Inspired by folk carnivals heralding the arrival of spring, the answer that her paintings of masked subjects, often staged amid dystopian environments, offer is one of youthful resilience.

Avery’s large-scale, multi-paneled paintings embody this resourcefulness from the first steps of her process. Utilizing found materials, Avery crafts costumes that are as much camouflage as they are regalia for her cast of young sitters. Photographs of the figures are then cut and collaged into scenes of found images that place them in abandoned, wild, and reclaimed settings. Images of old growth forests and nuclear ghost towns are repopulated with characters who seem to have sprung up from the overgrowth itself. Throughout this process of image crafting, both the agency of Avery’s subjects and the visual vocabulary that makes up their world are augmented. Settings taken over by nature are taken back by the young, whom Avery portrays not merely as survivors of the end times to which she nods, but as celebrants, as guerrillas, as participants in their coming of age.

Avery has exhibited extensively across California. Her paintings and portraits have been featured in solo shows, most recently Threshold at Morris Graves Museum of Arts (2025), Slipstream at the Triton Museum of Arts (2024), and Wayfinders (2026) at Cabrillo College. Triton acquired the centerpiece painting Slipstream for their permanent collection following the show. Avery has also exhibited in multiple group shows, such as at the de Young Museum (2023, 2020) and at the Crocker-Kingsley Art Show (2019).

Alongside her exhibitions, Avery has received numerous awards from institutions and juried competitions, including First Place at the prestigious Crocker-Kingsley Art Show (2019), Juror’s Awards from Left Coast Annual Juried Exhibitions (2022, 2020), and First Place from Salon at the Triton (2018, 2017). Her work was also featured in Issue #145 for the Pacific Coast edition of New American Paintings.

Avery trained with artists at the San Francisco Art Institute and UC Berkeley Extension School following a career in fashion and business.

She is represented by the Andra Norris Gallery in Burlingame, California.