Background
Patricia May Tavenner was born on March 22, 1941, in Doster, Michigan, United States.
Photographer teacher collage artist
Patricia May Tavenner was born on March 22, 1941, in Doster, Michigan, United States.
Tavenner earned a BA from Michigan State University, East Lansing, and an MFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.
Patricia Tavenner entered into the Mail Art network in the early 1970s, with the publication of her, "Mail Order Art". She published four issues from 1971-1972, that served as a distribution system for artists.
In addition to her role as publisher, Patricia Tavenner was also one of the early producers of artist postage stamps (artistamps), and was included in the first exhibition of the medium, James Warren Felter’s, "Artists’ Stamps and Stamp Images", held at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, in 1976. She was one of fourteen contributors representing the United States in the exhibition.
Patricia Tavenner continued her artistamp activity over the years, curating the "First California Artists Stamp Show" in 1995, and an exhibition on women artistamp producers for The Stamp Art Gallery in San Francisco in the 1990s. In 2007, she contributed to and attended the Budapest, Hungary, National Museum of Fine Arts exhibition, "ParaStamp: Four Decades of Artistamps from Fluxus to the Internet", organized by the Artpool Research Center (György Galántai).
Patricia Tavenner continued her publishing activities as well. Her Eternal Press published several editions of the periodical, "An Artist Speaks", and "A Family Line", documenting a video she produced on her family, as well as the autobiographical, "Four Years and More". She was a long time instructor of the Berkeley Extension Center in San Francisco and a practicing astrologer.
Patricia Tavenner was part of the Bay Area Dada Group in the mid-1970s. She was a fierce advocate of women’s issues in the arts, co-founding the Northern California Women’s Caucus for the Arts in 1972.