Alina Tenser

Alina Tenser is a Ukrainian-born artist and 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. She creates relational forms that invite somatic engagement, activating through bodily memory and fantasy rather than literal interaction. Central to this is the concept of affordances — handles, zippers, wheels — elements that suggest use and enable interaction, functioning both literally and metaphorically to reflect adaptation and resourcefulness under constraint. Tenser's work has been exhibited widely, with recent solo exhibitions at September Gallery (Kinderhook, NY), KinoSaito Art Center (Verplanck, NY), HESSE FLATOW (New York, NY), SE Cooper Contemporary (Portland, OR), 17Essex Gallery (New York, NY), Konstepidemin (Gothenburg, SE), Soloway Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), and AIR (New York, NY). Her work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, BOMB Magazine, Cultured, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Third Rail. In 2022, she completed In Parentheses, a public installation at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Chemo Infusion Center in Brooklyn. In 2024, her work was included in Great Women Sculptors, a Phaidon Press survey honoring 300 women sculptors from the Renaissance to today. She has participated in residencies at KinoSaito (Verplanck, NY), Triangle Arts (Brooklyn, NY), Lighthouse Works (Fishers Island, NY), the Queens Museum Studio Program (Queens, NY), and Recess (Brooklyn, NY). Tenser is an Assistant Professor of Art at Lehigh University, where she teaches sculpture.