Tina Marie Ferguson

About

TEENA MAREE | ARTIST BIO Teena Maree is a Phoenix-based multidisciplinary artist whose work moves freely between painting, fused and stained glass, sculpture, assemblage, metal, ceramics, mosaics, fiber, resin, collage, and found objects. With more than five decades of experience making art and a professional background in architecture, she approaches each piece with an unusual combination of technical knowledge, experimentation, storytelling, and instinct. Maree earned her Master’s degree in Architecture from Arizona State University, where her studies emphasized design for the arid Southwest. After spending approximately 15 years working in residential architecture, she increasingly turned her attention toward art, eventually building a career that encompasses fine art, public art, community arts education, and mixed-media work. Her artistic practice is rooted in the belief that materials carry histories. Discarded dolls, fragments of glass, old jewelry, metal, photographs, architectural elements, personal objects, and other overlooked materials frequently find their way into her work. Rather than limiting herself to a single medium, Maree chooses materials according to the story she wants a piece to tell. Her work often explores memory, transformation, mortality, femininity, symbolism, humor, loss, resilience, and the strange beauty found in objects that have already lived another life. Her current studio practice ranges from expressive paintings and dimensional mixed-media works to intricate assemblages incorporating fused glass, stained glass, metalwork, clay, wire, found objects, and sculptural elements. Her architectural training continues to influence the way she thinks about composition, structure, scale, negative space, and the relationship between an artwork and the environment surrounding it. Maree’s work has been exhibited throughout the Phoenix metropolitan area, including multiple works at FOUND:RE Phoenix Hotel. Her larger-scale experience also includes public artwork and murals, including work for the Minneapolis Veterans Home and a 22-foot mural created for Phoenix City Hall. Her career has also been deeply connected to arts education and community engagement. Beginning with Artsy Smartsy and later through the nonprofit HeARTsy, which she founded in 2018, Maree has spent years developing and teaching art experiences for adults, seniors, and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, her programming had expanded to dozens of recurring locations and reached hundreds of senior participants each month. Her contributions to art and community have been recognized with honors including the 2019 Phoenix Mayor’s Arts Award, the 2025 Phoenix MLK Jr. Award for inclusion, the 2018 Mesa Maker Fest Social Impact Award, a Minnesota Parkinson’s Center service award, and a 2020 Best of Show award for fused glass. A significant shift in Maree’s work followed the death of her father in 2024. The experience intensified her exploration of memory, personal artifacts, and the emotional lives of ordinary objects, ultimately prompting her to take a leap she had contemplated for years: making her own artwork the center of her professional life. Today, Maree continues to work across disciplines rather than choosing a single medium or category. Painting may become sculpture; glass may be joined with metal; discarded objects may become characters; fragments may become memorials. Across these different forms, the connecting thread is transformation: taking materials, memories, and experiences that might otherwise be overlooked and giving them a new visual life. For Maree, art is not simply an object to be viewed. It is a way of preserving stories, challenging expectations, creating connection, and finding beauty in the imperfect, unconventional, and unexpected.