About: Joseph Robinson was born in Oakland and grew up in the East Bay. Mr. Robinson grew up spending time in the dark room with his late father, who was an active professional jazz photographer in the 1960s and 1970s.
Mr. Robinson participated in The Art of Living Black for more than a decade. He participated in the One Black Day, My Race My Grace exhibition at the Sargent Johnson Gallery in the summer of 2003. He was a finalist in the Alameda County Art Commission Wall Corridor 2005 project for the new Juvenile Hall. In addition, he was a finalist in the Alameda County Art Commission Rotational Works Collection for 2005. He was featured in an Art of Living Black satellite photography exhibit, SNAP!, at the Women’s Cancer Resource Center in 2006. His work was featured at the Nomad Café, Oakland, California in February 2007. His work was at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, Glimpses in Time exhibit August, 2007.
His work has also been shown in the BABA: Black Artists Expressions of Father exhibits: San Francisco, 2006, Atlanta 2007, and New York 2008. He participated in Open Studios Event at Mills College through The Art of Living Black in February 2011. He participated in “Fathers in the Park” event with the Oakland Housing Authority in June, 2011. In 2012 and 2013, he participated in numerous Pacific Fine Arts Festivals street fairs. This exposed him to a wider audience and gave him a vehicle to create and show more of his landscape and floral work. He participated in Pro Arts Open Studios in 2014 and 2015. He was in the “NATURE (re)DEFINED” a photography exhibit at the Gray Loft Gallery in 2015. He has been in the Art of the African Diaspora since 2020.
About: My journey as an artist began in 1977 when I was enlightened by my uncle Nolan on a unique wood carving technique that his older brother Donald learned in prison. My first efforts were exact duplicates of my uncles’ work. After a few pieces, I altered their designs to add my own touch. After a few more, my own voice and vision emerged. I started out using scrap lumber, but an early turning point was my first visit to Southern Lumber Company in San Jose, CA. I was spellbound and spent hours sifting through exotic woods from all over the world. The touch, textures, colors, smells and grain patterns were mesmerizing. I think I touched every piece of wood in the place, from ash to zebrawood and some of that wood touched me as well. It was mind boggling to consider that the piece of ebony I held might have come from a tree that witnessed the birth of slavery. The slice of oak may have come from a tree that provided shade for the Underground Railroad. Maybe some mother’s son was hung from the Tennessee Pine. It was clear to me that those trees had stories to tell and I was determined to translate!
About: Legally blind poet, painter, playwright and teacher who guides us on an intimate journey of his past and present. Blackwell reveals stories of survival, memories and poetry, with fine art interspersed, social justice in motion, speaking powerfully his poems and music. Each of these media expose Blackwell’s challenging upbringing in both California and Mississippi, to his current creative life including discussions on loss, love, pain, and redemption — all through the prism of his artistic endeavors. Star of a documentary “The God Given Talent” and Disability Justice Award-Winner Charles Curtis Blackwell offers us his latest poem!
More info: Rent the film https://vimeo.com/ondemand/godgiven and Listen to more of Charles’ latest poetry at his new Bandcamp page, which has albums of audio poetry and music!
When not writing poems, I transition into painting. The media I typically apply as layers are Acrylic & Ink.
About: I have always known that my imagination could take my aesthetic experience anywhere I wished to go. My formal undergraduate art training began in Buffalo at the State University of New York. My work is inspired by what I feel and what I see. Seeing, expressing and creating art, which is influenced by the social forces within society, is what I do. Using the eye of the artist, my sculptures a rise from the intersection of imagination, interpretation and expression.
The intensity of the past year has caused me to revisit earlier works. They are included in this show. The 6″8″x 3′ pen and ink drawing began in 1967 and were completed in 2020 after the death of George Floyd. They were 53 years in the making, born out of the pain of social injustice. Both my work and I have come full circle.
Ceramic sculpture has dominated my work. The wall piece in this show was also revisited this year. “The Victim, Say His Name” echoes the mood that caused people to flood out into the streets because their cauldrons of anger boiled over. Some works are gentle and lyrical. Some are strong and bruising, some wail their pain and despair. The spectrum is immense and always accented by mood, texture, color, form sensitive line and expression. My Masks are inspired by the beautiful and endangered people of the Omo River Valley. My ceramic bust I refer to as Art that Breathes. My Steampunk pieces are my imagination in overdrive. I have included a link to my work where these works can also be seen. Juleerichardson44@gmail.com
More info: I am a Renaissance Woman. I sign my work Julee.
I was born on the East Coast, but have spent my adult life in Northern California. My formal undergraduate art training began in Buffalo at the State University of New York. I also spent a year abroad studying art in Siena Italy. As a child drawing and coloring was the only time I was still and focused.
When my journey is complete, my work will say. . . what I saw, what I felt, and tell my stories.
Images: “The Victim, Say His Name” (top), “Her Sacrifice” (bottom left), “Mothers of Generations” (bottom right)
About: “My works are prayers. Marks and strokes of paint serve as invocations.”
Bio: Dulama LeGrande is a visual artist born and reared in the Bay Area with a current studio practice in Oakland, CA. He has been making art with professional intent for the past seventeen years and taught art for a total of thirteen consecutive years in the East Bay and San Francisco. When not in his studio, Dulama can be found attaining art lessons from the streets, nature, and life itself.
1. “Untitled” mixed media on paper 22 x 30” $60 2. “Emma” mixed media on paper 30 x 22″ $60 3. “Toxic Kool-Aid” colored pencil on black paper 20 x 16″ $50
About: Lorraine Bonner turned to art to deal with personal trauma. Her work has moved from personal/political betrayal, in the Perpetrator series, to a vision of humanity beyond socially defined “color” in the Multi-Hued Humanity series. She calls her current series Mending, creating new beauty from our scars and broken places.
Lorraine Bonner lives and works in Oakland, California.
About: Genesse McGaugh is a 1999 graduate of Oakland’s California College of Art. The words “and Craft” had been removed from the name. As a precocious 5 year old, she certainly did her share of craft making, while attending Berkeley Child Art Studio. Though a child with extensive sight impairment, she participated in those Art classes until she was 14 years old. During high school, while the teacher read stories, Genesse loved to doodle figurative sketches while fantasizing about teenage love. Using her artistic talent in this way began to compile into pictorial diaries. She also learned how to paint, draw, create PaperMache and works on wood. Then Genesse had a stint in U. C. Davis’s Art program. She made a choice of learning how to create Linoleum prints. Once she transferred to CCA, she added fabric collage as her media of choice. Because she is legally blind, in order to see what she’s composing, the scale of her Art is usually 30″ x 40″. Her favorite subjects are personalities, food and landscapes.
In memoriam: Genesse McGaugh passed away on May 23, 2024. Her art lives on.
About: I am an artist and a photographer. During this pandemic and subsequent quarantine, I decided to learn something different but still within the art world. I decided to learn how to do acrylic pours and alcohol ink. I have watched countless numbers of YouTube videos and decided to give it a try. I really enjoyed working with the same acrylic materials but in a different way. It was interesting to see how those same materials mixed with other additives produced such different results.
I have shown work in AOTAD, the Richmond Art Center, the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, the San Pablo Art Gallery, the Rhodes Gallery, the Bridge Art Space, El Cerrito Art Association, and various other galleries. I have sold several pieces of my photography over the years including this year while in quarantine.
I usually submit a photography image or a painting or a pastel/conte piece for AOTAD, I decided to submit something different this year for this virtual show.
The submissions for this virtual show are three of my new pieces and I hope you enjoy them.
About: I am an abstract expressionist painter. Improvisation and color are the essential elements of my abstract seascapes and landscapes. Dominant motifs and inspiration for my work are land, sea and sky. I have recently begun incorporating cowrie shells as emotional avatars into my paintings.
Painting is the praxis that facilitates an entry point to share my unique gestural drawing style and historical content, creating a visual diary of my emotional terrain. Drawing and distressed or layered surfaces provide a foundation for the memories my paintings evoke.
I create large scale paintings on wooden panels inviting the viewer into my physical space to explore my action style of painting.
Abstract Expressionism, Action and Color Field painting and the improvisations of Jazz are both muse and foil to my dynamic surrealist landscapes.
More info: I am a painter who sculpts with color and texture. Wooden panels are my ground and paint is my voice, I extract memories of my interior emotional landscapes and present them as paintings.
My travels to Australia, Tahiti and New Mexico have informed the essential element that light manifests in my paintings. Distressed wood surfaces covered in vibrant gestural color and textures provide provide a glimpse of a moment in time crystallized in acrylic paint.
