Related Tactics is an artistic collective co-founded and led by artists and cultural workers Michele Carlson and Weston Teruya. Creating work together as one unit, Related Tactics collaborates at the intersection of race, culture, and public memory. Our projects explore the connections between art, movements for social justice, and the public through trans-disciplinary exchanges, collective making, and dialog. Related Tactics is also a conceptual space and platform where we employ curatorial strategies as artistic gestures to create opportunities within our communities and construct space for collective voice. We confront systemic and institutional racism or inequities that influence our immediate socio-cultural lived experience—a practice that benefits from collective support and sharing knowledge or resources. We do this through collaboration and critical thought strategically implemented amongst and for communities of color and the diaspora.

The collective has received grants and awards from Ruth Arts (2023-25, 2022), Kenneth Rainin Foundation (2023), Center for Craft: Craft Research Fund (2021), San Francisco Arts Commission (2021), George Washington University (2021, 2022), and Alternative Exposure (2015). Our projects have been exhibited and supported nationally and internationally, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, Corning Museum of Glass, Tacoma Museum of Glass, San Francisco Museum of Art and Design, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery at Parsons School of Design (New York), Southern Exposure Gallery, Chinese Cultural Center (San Francisco).

Related Tactics was founded in 2015 by Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, and Nathan Watson (co-founder, 2015-2024). While Related Tactics has always been an immediate collaboration between its core artists, there are many community members that make our work possible. We acknowledge the important role these partnerships play in what we do, who we are, and whom we hope to become. We are appreciative of this indebtedness in the long work of reciprocity and solidarity required within movement building.

Please see our CV for a more comprehensive outline of our practice.

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Michele Carlson // Co-founder

Michele uses creative strategies to question systems of power and legacies of racialization. She is a visual artist, writer, educator, and facilitator of projects ranging from conversations to publications to occasional curatorial endeavors. Her work is as much about how we create and endure systems of power as how we can refuse and reform them through creative imagining and action.

Carlson fostered her multidisciplinary practice at the University of Washington, where she received a BFA in printmaking, BA in interdisciplinary visual arts, and BA in history. Her making and writing practice was further developed at the California College of the Arts, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she earned an MFA in printmaking and an MA in visual and critical studies.

In her visual works on paper, which have been exhibited and supported nationally, Carlson often uses speculative, imaginative strategies to explore how humans engage collectively and affect one another. As a writer, she uses various writing styles to process the ways visual and material cultures reflect the lived experiences of diverse social groups. Her critical writings on art and culture have been published by Art in America, KQED, and Afterimage and include numerous catalogue essays and book chapters. She is currently working on a hybrid memoir titled The Visits, which examines the visual culture of incarceration as a means to explore constructions of kinship and family. This project has recently been supported by the Maryland State Arts Council, the San Leandro Arts Council, and Montalvo Center for the Arts. 

Her broader practice demonstrates a commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices through curatorial work, editorial direction and publishing, and leadership positions. From 2016 to 2019, Carlson was the executive director of Art Practical, a West Coast arts media organization that produced art writing, books, events, and podcasts about contemporary art. From 2011 to 2016, she served on various editorial and leadership teams, including as editor in chief of Hyphen, a media outlet for Asian American culture and politics.

From 2016 to 2019 she was as an associate professor of visual and critical studies at California College of the Arts, where she taught across the fields of critical theory and studio arts. She currently teaches at George Washington University as an associate professor of printmaking. michelecarlson.com

Weston Teruya // Co-founder

Weston is an artist and cultural producer who moves between individual and collective modes of practice to explore the haunting manifestations of racial inequity in the landscape and the possibilities of unraveling them using speculative and creative tactics. He has exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Mills College Art Museum, University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, Southern Exposure, and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; received public art commissions from the San Francisco and Alameda County Arts Commissions; grants from Artadia, Asian Cultural Council, CCI Investing in Artists, and Creative Work Fund; and been an artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, A. Farm Saigon, Montalvo Arts Center, Ox-Bow, the de Young Museum, Recology SF, and Kala Art Institute. Weston received his BA in Studio Art with a minor in Asian American Studies from Pomona College and an MFA in Painting & Drawing and MA in Visual & Critical Studies from California College of the Arts.

For three seasons (2017-19), he produced and hosted (un)making, an interview-based podcast highlighting the work of artists & cultural producers of color through the West Coast online arts writing and criticism publication, Art Practical. In his other professional work in the field, Weston has almost 15 years of experience across different roles in grantmaking and arts fund development: he has worked for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants program, served as a Commissioner with the Berkeley Civic Arts Commission, and sat on selection panels for funders including the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Creative Work Fund, Craft Research Fund, and Zellerbach Family Foundation. As a grant writer, he supports culturally-rooted arts organizations with a specialty in cultural equity, civic arts, and artist-centered projects. He has successfully secured grant funding for his clients ranging from National Endowment for the Arts - Our Town to Hewlett Foundation 50 Commissions. westonteruya.com

Our team, collaborators, and friends

joey enríquez // Designer and do-er of all

As a practice of undoing, repositioning, and rematerializing erasure of memory, experience, and environmental decay, Joey Enríquez uses image-making and sculpture to unearth the effects of generational trauma and the historicities of land claim and displacement. By looking to archives and repurposing derelict found materials, Enríquez creates sites of tension and imbalance between then, now, here, and there. Additionally, they run long distances to foster a physical relationship between the land, those that occupy this continent, and themself as a praxis of reclaiming their own indigenous Apache and chicane lineage and of decolonization.

Enríquez earned their B.A. in Art–Design from California Lutheran University in 2018 and their M.F.A. in Fine Arts at the George Washington University in 2020. They were a Fellow with Hamiltonian Artists in the 2020–2022 cohort and were awarded a residency through The Studios at MASS MoCA in November 2021. Enríquez also completed a Short-Term Residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington. https://www.joeyenriquez.com/

Mia Nakano // collaborator, photographer, and facilitator of cheese

Mia Nakano is an artist, archivist, and social change maker rooted in Oakland. Her work is shaped through her experiences as a proud 4th generation Japanese American, queer woman of color, daughter of a single mother, and sister of a deaf adult. She is a self-taught artist, who advocates the strategic and ethical use of the arts to make social change. Nakano is the Director of the Visibility Project and Director of the Resilience Archives.

She is a board member of Banteay Srei, whose work is dedicated to ending the sexual exploitation of young Southeast Asian women in Oakland. She works full-time as the IT Director of the Asian American for Civil Rights and Equality (AACRE) network, and co-founder of Hyphen magazine.

Nakano has dedicated the last two decades of her life to uplifting the stories and histories of LGBTQ Asian Pacific Americans.  She has contributed work to Colorlines, the Kathmandu Post, Democracy Now! the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Institute, Salon.com, APEX Express, Intersection for the Arts, and de Young. She is a strategic consultant for numerous artists, non-profits, and small businesses, bringing ethics, accessibility, and mindfulness around digital security and privacy to all work. mianakano.com