Maria del Camino

Bruce Tomb was born in 1958 at the Alameda Naval Air Station and raised in the context of boatbuilding, automobiles, and art, in Oakland, CA. He received a B.S. in Architecture from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA in 1981. Tomb studied with Superstudio and in Florence, Italy. His Granite Cooktop, winner of Progressive Architecture magazine’s 1984 Furniture Design Competition, was exhibited at the Whitney Museum in 1985. Several related works are part of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Interim Office Of Architecture (IOOA), 1984-1998, was co-founded by Bruce Tomb with John Randolph, The collaborative blurred the boundaries between art, design, and architecture. Perhaps best known for the Latrine, 1988, at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the GPS guided installation Gnomon, 1996, at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He established the interdisciplinary practice, BRUCE TOMB in 1998. Recent endeavors include: the (de)Appropriation Project and the (de)Appropriation Project Archive, http://www.deappropriationproject.net, the ongoing custodianship and documentation of an anarchistic public art project fronting the jail cells of the former Mission Police Station in San Francisco. As an expansion in 2015, he completed a memorial to free speech; supported by the San Francisco Arts Commission. The robotic Maria del Camino, http://mariadelcamino.brucetomb.com, debuted at Burning Man 2010, then was deployed at Zero One in San Jose, Performance Studies International Conference 19 at Stanford University, and Ft. Mason Center for Arts and Culture in San Francisco in 2016. The project has been supported through a grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation. He has taught at UC Berkeley, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and was a Senior Adjunct Professor at California College of Arts in San Francisco/Oakland, teaching Architecture, Interdisciplinary and Sculpture studios from1993-2009. BruceTomb.com