Joan Tarika Lewis

Joan Tarika Lewis

Joan Tarika Lewis has often been described as a Renaissance woman. Visual Artist, Jazz Violinist, teacher, and genealogist Ms. Lewis graduated from Cal State East Bay and the Academy of Art in San Francisco. Her artwork focuses on African culture, musicians, and Black family life. Ms. Lewis also has also painted a collection of paintings based upon her experiences in the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

This leads to a very important component in the process of my work. I like to invite family, community into my space, to create something unifying. In each exhibit, I have a piece or work either my family member created or had some hand in the making of that work. This inclusion is important, for the exhibition space is designed to separate the community apart from the individual whereas I try to gather parts of myself, my family my community into the work to not only celebrate the beauty I produced but how that production could not have existed without them. The implementation emerges as various assemblage pieces that show the constant battle of claiming the self. However, it doesn’t always turn into but can sometimes become a beautiful struggle.

Bridget Maria Goodman

Bridget Maria Goodman

In my world, terrestrial life is an art form and it’s important that my art convey the eccentricity of my life. It’s a life enveloped in the naturalness of spirituality. I am inspired by everything, good and not so good, although muses cascade from foundations of love as they move me and through me. I am inspired by found objects, objects with a pre-history and vivid energy that call to me in passing. I draw, paint, sculpt and love mixed media assemblages.
God, nature and trees are the air that I breathe. Jesus is the rock in my internal and eternal universe and I am bound by the stars of the Holy Spirit and all that nature nourishes, 24/7. 365, around the sun.
Thus, by the grace of God go I. This has produced me and underscores my artistic drive and tenaciously binds me to the core condition of human society to express its pains and its wonders, its ugliness and its beauty, its regressions and its progressions. It’s always both, and, always moving.
2021.

The works are about Blackness, being Black, loving Black, enjoying Black, living Black, seeing the black of the night - embracing all of life, drawing with black charcoal and transforming. Africans are children of the stars guided by the Divine Universe - there's so much to learn and remember. The mystery of the deep, dark place of Heaven reflects in the melanin in every human being, from the blue black to the snow black. So much has been forgotten. It's a journey through various and varying strata to not forget amidst the noise. There's a harmonious chord threading through the world that's so beautiful and connecting. Connecting the dots. The Black Dot is in everyone.

Nimah Gobir

Nimah Gobir

Nimah Gobir is an artist and educator based in Oakland, California. Through paintings and installations, her work explores the nuances and shared experiences of being Black, drawing on text and photo references collected from both family and personal archives.

Gobir completed her undergraduate studies at Chapman University with a B.F.A. in Studio Art and B.A. in Peace Studies. She has an M.Ed from Harvard Graduate School of Education with a focus in Arts in Education. She has shown work at ForYourArt, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The Growlery, and Root Division where she was awarded the Blau-Gold Studio/Teaching fellowship. Last year, she completed a fellowship with Emerging Artist Professionals SF-Bay Area.

Her projects include The Coloring Book, a coloring book of black women that she produced in 2017 and a participatory coloring installation at the Alumni of Color Conference at Harvard Graduate School of Education. In March 2018, Gobir co-created Non-Sterile Art Happenings, a pop-up art exhibition in a UHAUL truck in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
nimahgobir.com

These paintings are from Old House, a series that explores Gobir’s relationship to homes she lived in throughout her life as she grew up in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. These works explore the artist's relationship to home as a concept, physical dwelling, and feeling.

Many of the paintings draw from archival photos to offer intimate access to bedrooms and living rooms where the artist interacts with her family. Embroidery, used in many of Gobir’s paintings, infuses artworks with feelings of domesticity and comfort. The use of sewing to create repetitive patterns is both mundane and precise, mirroring the way homes take on a banality while being unique to each family.

The title Old House refers to how the artist references all of her past homes– sometimes as a blanket statement: “In my old house…” or by their nicknames: the name of the street, group of condos, or city itself.

Takiyah Franklin

Takiyah Franklin

Oakland native singer, Takiyah Franklin, transforms her life one song at a time. Connecting classic soul with our urgent needs of today, Takiyah shows us how songwriting can be used to impress upon our very reality. She demonstrates how our voices can be used to call forth our dearest desires and fiercest powers. With her latest project of 3 ultra-smooth songs, she conjures into her life (and the life of everyone singing along) familial, romantic and self love.

Alise Eastgate

Alise Eastgate

Alise Eastgate is a painter, designer, illustrator, and muralist. Her work explores her experiences, connections to nature and her belief that all living beings deserve the right to live, love and be free. She has exhibited work in solo and group shows in Oakland and San Francisco, including the de Young Museum, and live-painted at events and festivals throughout California and the Fiji Islands.

Through their joint project, EastRand Studios, Alise and her life and creative partner Jack Eastgate, have designed and illustrated for artists, activists, and nonprofits and painted murals in Oakland, Sacramento and Fiji.

Divine Guidance

Divine Guidance features a young girl atop a humpback whale with poppies extending from her body. She represents both a personal inner child being cared for by an elder version of self and also the collective youth being held by ancestors.

Nicole Dixon

Nicole Dixon

Nicole Dixon was born in Oakland, CA and in 2002, received a BA in Studio Art at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA. In addition to exhibiting paintings, she has produced commissioned works, and installations for community engagement. She has served as the altar-artist for numerous gatherings, conferences and activist organizations. She is also a Montessori preschool teacher, and firmly believes education and creative expression should go hand-in-hand. She has taught art to youth and adults alike, which has taken her as far as the Kalahari as guest art instructor. Nicole uses art as an interactive medium, and vehicle for self-transformation, community bridge-building, and positive social change.

In creating a blueprint for advancing the architecture of Black culture, I am compelled to draw from the wisdom of the ancestors, and of mother earth herself. There is no moving forward without understanding both the lessons of the past and the resources of the present. I collect them, and weave them together to create archetypal figures. Each figure counters mainstream narratives of Blackness and upholds true Black identity.
Navigating this world as a Black woman, I use art to find the transcendent purpose of my experiences and create cathartic figures. Each mixed media material has its own resonance, and their layering reflects the complexity of the subject matter. The natural, cultural, and spiritual symbols all reflect, embolden, and honor the figures. Each figure is rooted in and strengthened by ancestry.
As a Black woman and an artist, nature is both my teacher and my healer. Nature is constantly showing us that everything is intricately connected, and our very existence is just life’s longing for itself. As I often seek refuge in nature, her abundance, generosity, and cyclic renewal are life lessons for my own path. I use natural imagery and materials in my work to infuse my figures with palpable energy and power. My sincere hope is that viewers walk away associating unapologetic blackness with beauty, power, abundance, and spirit.

Paula deJoie

Paula deJoie

Paula Price deJoie was born and raised in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles and moved to her father’s hometown of Berkeley to attend Cal where she studied Fine Art and Law. Growing up, Paula was blessed to be exposed to a variety of artists from Charles White to Elizabeth Catlett to Nigeria’s Twin Seven Seven and to many other prominent black artists who exhibited in the historic Brockman Gallery run by brothers Alonzo Davis and Dale Davis. Both of her parents created art on the side at home, so she always felt that being an artist was a real and valued career option.

As a student in the UC Berkeley Art Department in the 70’s, all of Paula’s professors were white and male. They loved her abstracts and figure drawings, however when she painted political subject matter, they didn’t quite know how to respond. She felt very much alone and was thrilled when David Bradford created the Black Art Department and Malaquias Montoya headed up the Chicano Art Center in two redwood shingled buildings off campus. The energy there was welcoming and invigorating, and Paula felt free to express whatever was inside her.

Paula recently completed training to lead healing art circles and is focused on providing Elders with Sacred Spaces in which to tell their stories and share their wisdom with pen and brush. Her paintings in this year’s TBWIG are reflective of her healing arts journey.

As an Elder now, Paula is focused upon reassessing her life’s journey and reimagining how she wishes to express herself in her next chapter. From childhood on, Paula has turned to art and writing as healing balms, and she continues to apply art as a powerful and effective tool for transformation. The paintings exhibited in this year’s TBWIG reflect Paula’s growing connection to Spirit, to Mother/Father God and especially to the Goddess inside each of us.

Paula heard, somewhere along her journey, that “there’s nothing stronger than a broken woman who has put herself back together.” Black Women have carried the brunt of our people’s pain for generations and Paula believes that each one of us deserves to put down that heavy load and celebrate not only our odds-defying strength but our beauty and compassion, our creativity and our wit, our intelligence and our spirituality, and most of all, our dreams yet to be fulfilled. Beginning with self-love and appreciation, and supported with the love and encouragement of our connective circles, we can have it all…we can finally live our lives overflowing with joy and abundance. Paula hopes that her paintings support all Sisters on this creative healing path towards whatever success looks like to each one of us. And so it is.