Karen Seneferu

ARTIST, Co-Curator and Founder of The Black Woman is God

Karen Seneferu is one of the most thought provoking visual artists of our time. Born and raised in Oakland California, her childhood was fed by revolutionary politics and the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley and has dedicated her life to working as an educator and artivist. Self taught in her artistic craft, Senefuru is obsessed with gathering information, imagery and ideas. As a result, her work contains a completeness that belies her brief tenure as a multimedia artist. Using natural and manufactured materials she boldly examines the ancient and contemporary, turning modern objects into artifacts. This Afrofuturistic aesthetic provides a curative intersection between technological and the spiritual. Senefuru’s is grounded in the philosophy that space has hidden meaning. Therefore, her work seeks to enter into and transform the meaning of space.

At the center of my work is beauty. Despite what I create I want beauty to be resistance to annihilation. Often times public and private domains are structures of trauma for the Black body that distort how the individual views the self. I want to challenge the dehumanizing depictions by rooting beauty in the African esthetics. I use iconic patterns, forms and colors associated to the cultural value of Africa form and in some cases, integrate those components with technology to speak to the contemporary concerns. This allows for me to dialogue with traditional African art while attempting to advance the medium of the work.

Reoccurring patterns and shapes emerge in my forms. One is the cross, that for me symbolizes peace. The shape represents the crossroad figure who becomes the place of struggles for Africans in American because the binary construct demands one give up one’s cultural identity for the possibility of belong. However, within Yourba spiritual practice, the cross is God. The Kalunga, line establishes a threshold or boundary between the world of the living and the dead associated through bodies of water, like the Atlantic Ocean. 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.

Dana King

Dana King is a classical figurative sculptor who creates public monuments of Black Bodies in Bronze. She studies the strength and resilience of African descendants and create pieces made of clay with her hands that are then cast in bronze.

King prefers sculptures because they inhabit space and space is power. She believes sculpture provides an opportunity to shape culturally significant memories that determine how African descendants are publicly held and remembered.

Research is fundamental to her work. When digging for threads to weave together stories of the past, there are historically generalized and racist ideologies that demand a wholesale upheaval of the normative misrepresentation of the emotional and physical sacrifices of Black peoples. African descendants deserve public monuments of truth that radiate their powerful and undying resilience created from a Black aesthetic point of view.

King’s sculptures link generations by revealing common threads: shared values, experiences, and aspirations. She knows they help those alive today compare and contrast their world with that of social pioneers, both enslaved and free, whose courage and commitment to excellence helped create a modern society. Dana King creates memories, hoping you see yourself and those you love in her work.

Trees have the capacity to feed and care for other trees, even those of different species. They protect themselves and those nearby from insect infestation. They feast on carbon dioxide and in return, oxygenate the air. Towering and ever watchful, they speak to one another and hold secrets.

There are trees on plantations where enslaved people were confined, their roots fed from the soil where the dead were buried. The trees are still standing there, swaying, remembering the losses. They continue to bear witness while creating life, seed after seed, scattered by the wind.

There were countless babies born on those plantations, who, over the centuries, were snatched and sold from a tenderness they were never allowed to enjoy. They grew up not knowing their stories, cut off from their past, their history, their connections. The mothers who birthed them had to watch their babies as they were scattered by the wind.

Trees never forget.

Marnika Shelton

Marnika Shelton, AKA Nika Cherrelle, is an engaging, vibrant, artist, educator, and activist with over 25 years of experience in the Fine Arts. Classically trained in sculpture she specializes in figurative ceramics and portraiture, Marnika uses the visual arts as a platform to drive home complex, layered, and controversial narratives. Designed to engage the viewer in conversations that challenge socially and culturally normative viewpoints around race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion. She takes on topics such as indoctrination and historical prejudice by recreating stories from unexplored angles to expose longstanding impacts on society. Views of masculinity, prejudice, violence, shame, sexuality, and how fear creates difference are all within the scope of her work.
Marnika enjoys speaking in communities, classrooms, and institutions about Art, Sexuality, and Politics. Her work exists to empower and inspire people across all cultural backgrounds. By breaking down taboo, she aims to create a world where all people feel loved, honored, and respected.

Marnika Shelton is also the Founder and operator of Nika Cherrelle’s LLC.

Focusing on the paradigm of the African-American experience, Marnika’s work Focuses on the contradictions that now exist as a result of centuries of oppression. Contradictions, such as African-American beauty standards, gender stereotypes, and sexuality fuel their creative process. African-American ideals of beauty mirror the past ideals of their Caucasian counterparts. Marnika uses satire to expose how these standards have affected the esteem of a mass number of people over several generations. In the piece, Hairy Nuisance (2008), coarsely textured hair is used to create a rope, which is then tied into a noose to represent the stigma that hair can play in personal identity.
Gender stereotypes also have a major role in their work. With Dual Compensation Series (2008), sex toys are fused with standard handguns to provoke ideas of falsified, or compensated masculinity. These pieces are meant to entertain as well as raise questions about the many ways our society views the power gender paradigm.

This work exists in a world that fueled by history, stereotypes, and prejudice to question the social constructs and cultural norms that have defined society.

Lorraine Bonner

Lorraine Bonner turned to art late in life, as a way of dealing with personal trauma. She soon recognized the parallels between the betrayal and violence she had suffered in childhood and the betrayal and violent plunder that form the foundation of our current way of life. Her work has moved from depictions of personal/political betrayal, in the Perpetrator series, to a vision of humanity beyond the limitations of socially defined “color” in the Multi-Hued Humanity series. She is now working on a series she calls the Mended series, in which our scars and broken places take on a new beauty.

Lorraine Bonner lives and works in Oakland, California, close to her children and grandchildren.

We live in a society in which wounding is unavoidable. We are told that this is normal, but it is possible to imagine a different sort of society, one more in keeping with the original intent of social living, in which we care for one another, practice altruism and empathy, and are both trusting and trustworthy. Our wounds and scars are the measure of how far from this “Beloved Community” we are, the places where our need for compassion and witness comes up against the bullwhip and branding iron of the sociopathic plutocracy.
These scars are no cause for shame. They represent what is most human in us. In her series, “Mended” Lorraine Bonner transforms these broken places into patterns of light, not flaws, but proof of the tender vulnerability of the human heart.

Cynthia Brannvall

Cynthia Brannvall is a California native of African American and Swedish descent. Cynthia is a multi-media artist and art historian. Cynthia has undergraduate degrees in Art Practice and Art History from UC Berkeley where she was a Phi Beta Kappa and a Ronald E. McNair Scholar and was awarded the Departmental Citation for her research in Art History. She has an MA in Art History from San Francisco State University with an emphasis on Modern and Contemporary art. Cynthia’s artwork explores identity formation envisioned in an imagined deep time terrain of memory, reclamation, and the geographies of forced and voluntary migrations. Her artwork has selected for juried group exhibitions in Berkeley, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, San Rafael, Palo Alto, San Luis Obispo, and Los Angeles. She has had 15 artworks placed in the bay area shows through the SF Moma Artist Gallery. Cynthia Brannvall is a full-time tenured track professor of Art History at Foothill College. An active advocate for social justice and equity, Cynthia is engaged in the campus communities Umoja and Sankofa, which aim to uplift, and support students of color and amplify their voices and excellence in scholarship.

Textiles are potent signifiers of labor, trade, industry, slavery, luxury, baptisms, weddings, funerals, gender, and history. Brannvall engages with textiles to exist between craft and fine art, the past and the present, painting, and sculpture, landscape, and portrait. Another layer of meaning in the work
considers contradictions of whiteness in textiles alluding to the constructs of something pure, stained, fragmented, constructed, degraded, broken, and enduring.

Continents engage with identity as a terrain imagined from memory, nostalgia, and culture in flux from forced and voluntary migrations. The three panels represent the continents that comprise the deep time origins and migrations of the artists’ ancestry. The composed abstract patterns are imagined protein folds of DNA that travel across bodies of water and continents through inherited traits into the bodies of ancestors. This work explores the capacity of textiles to create a visual language for identity that acknowledges, respects and celebrates the entanglement of multiple identities, and the ways in which they are tethered to history, culture, economies, and geographies.

The Threads that Bind A Divided Nation is the US flag rendered in cotton by a black woman and includes the Mason Dixon Line gap that is the root of disparity engendering white supremacy from the bodies of its black and indigenous and first nation inhabitants. Threads stitched throughout express the interconnected and tangled culpability of the country as a whole with all of its ideologies and systems of oppression.

The encaustic sculpture installation Present Council are vulnerable ghostly presences evoking the hard-fought historical battles for women’s rights and speak to the fragility of those rights in present circumstances. The 19th-century blouses hold the memory of their wearers and the encaustic preserves and evokes their presence. Ghostly and fragile but holding hallowed ground.

Jurisdiction, is composed of 9 sleeve fragments represent the supreme court justices— 3 of the sleeve fragments have feminine details indicating the female justices. They oppose a set of lacy feminine sleeves indicating the gender balance in legislating women.

Idris Hassan

Idris Hassan is a photographer and cultural documentarian working in Oakland, CA, and throughout the Bay Area. She is a graduate of Cal State East Bay and Naropa University with a Masters in Liberal Arts. Hassan’s work explores the deep context between the subjects and their environment, incorporating the themes of healing, belonging, and an exploration of the Diaspora. With an archive of twenty plus years of work, Hassan has traveled abroad capturing the visual essence of various communities. While transitioning from 35mm photography to digital, Idris began to incorporate collage mixed media works into her portfolio. Her photography, mixed media, and collage work have been featured in the “Black Artists on Art” Legacy Exhibit at Oakstop Gallery, the Annual “Art of Living Black” Exhibition at the Richmond Art Center, the “Oakland Women's Day” exhibition at Betti Ono Gallery, Afro Solo's "Reflecting the Light Series" at the San Francisco Public Library, and at various exhibitions in the Bay Area. Ms. Hassan's work has also been featured in the Summer 2015 issue of “African Voices”, a Collection of Soulful Art and Literature. In 2018 her photography was featured in “Photoville” in Brooklyn, NY, and in 2019 at Photoville: LA as part of the exhibition “Altar: Prayer, Ritual, Offerings” curated by Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. In 2020 she was a featured artist in "Don't Shoot: An Opus to the Opulence of Blackness" at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Idris Hassan is a documentarian and participating artist in the annual "Black Woman is God Exhibition".

"Masks Sold Here" is a digital collage exploring the intersection of a piece of historic Oakland facing a global pandemic, the world uprising against racist oppression, and Citizen’s uplifting healing energy in the midst of a deeply transformational time on this planet.

Nathalie Okra

Painting Femininity, motherhood, childhood, simplicity, spontaneity, energy, Africa is a deep inspiration for the artist, discovering his identity, Caribbean, European.
Many of Nathalie Okra's works are mixed portraits mixing the figurative and the abstract, the natural and the urban, the geometric and the fluid, inspired by both African (primitive art, African masks, symbols) and European (symbolism) arts. , surrealism, contemporary art) it is a mixture of the two worlds which meet on the canvas, resulting from a double culture the artist shows it and expresses it in his work without ambiguity.
Acrylic paint as well as other materials like spray paint, or chalk are used vividly and contrast on canvas or paper, she emphasizes color, but sometimes likes to mix black and white elements with it. His works are contrasted by their colors, the materials, and the emotions that emerge from them. His art is in motion and is not fixed in a final form, it is in perpetual evolution.

Nathalie Okra art gives strong and powerful images of Black representation, she melts all her origins in one pot and brings something different but familiar.
Flavours of Culture from West Indies, France, and Africa dance on canvas, in so many different ways, but always succeed to mix with some kind of harmony. Universal and Local at the same time. She wants to explore videos, Visual art, and performance, she already did a short fiction, and she really likes to express through moving images.

Snowwhite

Snowwhite Silas is a passionate female artist trained in the Institute of Management and Technology, (IMT), Enugu, Nigeria. She tells her stories using diverse media but her best is charcoal and acrylic on canvas. Her best subjects are those relating to the girlchild and womanhood. In her own words, she says, "I am a woman with a difference. I believe every woman is made for more than the kitchen. The society may be against the woman in diverse ways. Our lives may be characterized by teas and pains but amidst the pains and sorrows of the woman emerges that inner beauty that is worth more than silver and gold."

Snowwhite envisions a world where women are appreciated, respected and honoured. The woman is the last born of God's creation and carries in her that ability to recreate, nurture and preserve. We must not sit down and watch the woman trampled upon for in her lies potentials untapped. She may seem weak at some point but beyond that weakness lies a great strength unseen. Women can change the world for good. Invest in a woman and change the world for good.