Jessica Oler

Jessica S. Oler was born and bred in Davis, California. She earned her Master’s in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts in 2019. In addition to her Master’s degree, she has earned her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from San Francisco State University and three Associates degrees in Social Science, Liberal Arts, and Sociology. Since earning her Master’s she successfully completed the 2019 Visual Art Residency in Chautauqua, New York. In addition to this she has been in art shows in Chautauqua, New York; Alexandria, NSW, Australia; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Albany, Oakland, and San Francisco, California; and Miami, Florida. She also had the honor of being invited to speak at the School of Nursing at UC Davis for a ‘Race and Health’ seminar composed of graduate and medical students where she presented her research surrounding the navigation of disease development alongside her art practice.

Her MFA Award Winning Thesis “Acclimatization: Unprotected Black Female Flesh” continues to be a platform for the formulation of her artistic and research endeavors. By viewing the body as a landscape that tracks and catalogs herstories/histories, she is guided by the girth of her relationship with her body post-diagnosis of multiple sclerosis; landscape; time; Black Geography; and site.

Oler actively supports and participates in advocacy work through the National Multiple Sclerosis Society since her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2012. The onset of said diagnosis continues to fuel her interest in disease development, environmental health, and sustainability.

My present work is involved with space, movement, stagnation, and herstory/history that is generally worked through with video, photography, and/or collage. Seriality and collage are my instincts. A collection of various, specific things. Photographs. Tree bark. Trees. History. My body. Doorways to unknown lands. Skin. Implications of skin. Compositionally sound among the conceptual chaos. I utilize socio-political research and personal narrative as a guiding force to work through larger racial, geographical, and social investigations surrounding Blackness. I’m continuing to work through the concept of “unprotected Black female flesh”, initially born from my lived experience with Multiple Sclerosis thus far. With “unprotected Black female flesh” as the centerpiece of my thought processes, the various offshoots of engrained, systemic injustices are investigated. My most recent paper on canvas series focuses on Black Geography. This series utilizes collage and social abstraction through my original photography.

Tajianna Okechukwu

Tajianna Okechukwu is an actress, filmmaker, and activist from the Bay Area. She obtained a double degree in Acting and Film & TV Studies from Azusa Pacific University. After graduating, she has returned home to direct several short films and music videos. Her 2019 mini-documentary Flexin’ in My Complexion was selected to premiere at the Mbongui Square Festival film screening at Eastside Arts Alliance in Oakland. After that, it was installed at the Unbound Roots exhibition at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco. She is known for her videography work on promotional videos for Black-owned businesses and brands in her community. Her work in front and behind the camera often focuses on stories that explore social issues through a Black diaspora lens. Tajianna strives to tell stories that will shift paradigms and shake culture to achieve racial reconciliation in our society.

Eve cultivates divinity within her body through her connection with the Divine Feminine.

Being divine is first being aware of who you are at your core.

For Eve, she has found herself again by dredging through the dark, murky parts--not only to observe it but also to clear it out by acknowledging all that has collected on her spirit through her life, expressing her suppressed sorrows out loud to herself or those she felt needed to hear it. Eve's art reflects her soul; where once she felt alone when in all honesty the only being she needed to unite with was her own self. When she met and accepted herself without all the extra weight of the world, love began to flourish at her core. It now manifests in Eve's art, effortlessly.

Eve Greenberg

Adopted from Louisiana and raised in the parallel realities of Sonoma County and the Big Island of Hawaii, Eve Greenberg knows what it means to lose oneself in the enveloping static of untruth about oneself. Through childhood and adolescence, Eve felt isolated and anxious, unable to connect and relate to others around her.

As an alternative to school some days, Eve's mother would take her driving through the countryside to ease her anxiety. Those long drives outside of town turned into 'photo trips' when her mom lent her a DSLR camera during one of their trips. That was when the door to self discovery was opened.

Eve would take pictures of all the extraordinary beauty that nature had to offer, thus being a major catalyst to her art stylings today. It wasn't until moving to Oakland, California at 19 years old, was there a rebirth of a new perspective: vastitude of who she could be as a photographer, and who she was as a woman. Ever since, she has been creating imagery that reflects the visions she holds within her mind.

Eve cultivates divinity within her body through her connection with the Divine Feminine.

Being divine is first being aware of who you are at your core.

For Eve, she has found herself again by dredging through the dark, murky parts--not only to observe it but also to clear it out by acknowledging all that has collected on her spirit through her life, expressing her suppressed sorrows out loud to herself or those she felt needed to hear it. Eve's art reflects her soul; where once she felt alone when in all honesty the only being she needed to unite with was her own self. When she met and accepted herself without all the extra weight of the world, love began to flourish at her core. It now manifests in Eve's art, effortlessly.

Diamela Cutino

Diamela Cutiño is a photographer from Havana, Cuba. Her art is known for its unique way of capturing movement, whether social, political, spiritual, or physical. Diamela is most know for her work documenting black culture in Cuba including the Lukumi religion, Hip Hop, and Jazz. Now Diamela lives in the Bay Area documenting the AfroAmerican womxn history.

My photography since the 90s represents the history of black people, first in Cuba and now in the US. Every image has a sound and soul. My vision is to continue documenting the history of black womax/n and the black community in every place where I am.

KaliMa Amilak

KaliMa Amilak is an Afro-Caribbean photographer native from Brooklyn, New York. They have exhibited artwork in various galleries in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, including BatHaus Gallery, SOMArts Cultural Center, Joyce Gordon Gallery, Richmond Arts Center, The San Francisco Human Rights Commission, and published in AFROPUNK. They were also awarded the Jan-Hart Schuyers Artistic Achievement Award at The Art of The African Diaspora at the Richmond Arts Center in 2020 and was interviewed with Bay Area Art Beat. While their main focus is the celebration of black women and black people through self-empowerment and liberation, KaliMa is a versatile photographer with experience in live-action performance art, event photography, sports photography, portraiture, and editorial photography.

This submission of this project comes from a recent series, "Chrysalis," which is a poetic photography series where KaliMa explores the complexities of what its like to internally reset in order to grow during a time of an internal and external transition in response to the pandemic through haikus.

Tijera S. Williams

Tijera S. Williams is a multimedia painter, photographer, and design artist based in Los Angeles, CA. By utilizing traditional techniques of painting and drawing, and marrying that with strong color relationships and significance in dominant linear qualities, Tijera's work revises the male-centered Eurocentric worldview of that of a twenty-first-century Afro-diasporic female gaze as her driving communication. Tijera strives to create work that acts as a megaphone of advocacy for victims, inform and challenge those who have privilege, and deliver a beautiful yet charged image to represent her cultural significance as a Black woman in America.

Utilizing stark vibrant colors, conceptualizing patterns, and hiding optical illusions inside of the work, these three components are some of Tijera’s trademark style choices to translate the message across without compromising the complexity of the work to her audiences The source of her subject matter focuses on transforming and delivering re-appropriation based ideas of famed artworks from the fourteenth to sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance periods and connecting them to her current-day twenty-first century Afro-diasporic female worldview. Tijera’s overall subject matter is constantly and ever-consistently tying with current events, as the toll to be a Black woman in America is one that is completely unique on its own. By merging her personal activism with the Renaissance trope in the world today, she exploits the strong relationship to power and privilege, while also sharing the wealth with those who look reflect her who aren't able to be privileged enough to learn about the arts or even see themselves in this representation.

Taylor "Made" Mosley

Taylor “Made” Mosley is an Oakland born and Bay Area raised producer whose specialty is making punchy, visceral content that incites audiences to partake and engage with the world. She’s interested in creating new narratives in the Black community which centers Black voices. A content creator for seven years, she has experience working corporate, non-profit, and independent production in various positions. Taylor has worked with municipal, non-profit, and artist communities throughout the SF Bay Area. She is now turning to directing and writing screenplays that tell the stories of the people, spaces, and places from her childhood home, Oakland, CA. Her desire is to showcase the “special sauce” that makes “The Town” unique and the many talented artists of color who live in The Bay, for bigger audiences and screens.

On May 2nd, 1962 Malcolm X held a famous speech in LA where he stated “the most disrespected person in America is the Black woman”, “the most unprotected person in America is the Black woman”, “the most neglected person in America is the Black”.

The Black Womxn is the Most project was created out of exhaustion. Tired of hearing the same old rhetoric about what it means to be a Black womxn in America, Taylor “Made” Mosley derived this prompt from Malcolm X’s famous speech. After almost sixty years of hearing the same speech, Taylor “Made” Mosley invites Black womxn to fill in the blank with a kind word, and decide for themselves who’ll they’ll be in America.

Ali Montgomery

Ali has devoted her life to art, healing and play. She believes that life is Art and that the spiritual and sexual are sacred when joined.

Ali is a social justice warrior, guiding groups and individuals as they explore the complexities of racism and internalized oppression. She trains mental health workers to support empowerment for our children.

This balance of play and justice, art and training - while allowing individuals to be fully who they are - is core to Ali.

How do we embrace our own truth, how do we hold sacred our culture, our sexuality, our spirituality, our identity distinct and different from every other individual? Ali Montgomery explores these questions through painting, photography, dance, song, connection to nature, expression of spirituality, and sexuality. Her passion is a force of nature which is evident in her art, training, and spiritual practice.

Ali has explored her African ancestry for over twenty-five years. From this frame, Ali is presenting this series of portraits, based on a few of the attributes traditionally embraced as aspects of God. She hopes these depictions support an understanding of how she views her own embodiment as The Black Woman as God.

Photography by WolfMercury

This project began three year ago when Ali attended the opening event for The Black Woman Is God. Ali was inspired to create a painting addressing the unification of Spirituality and Sexuality which Ali referrers to as the Spirexual Nexus.

Once the painting was created entitled “Kundalini Rising”, Ali then understood there needed to be a photo series in conjunction with the painting. The series depicts aspects of her African roots as a conjurer of The Black Woman as God; embodying the spiritual nexus as warrior and healer – powerful, fierce, sensual, and nurturing.

The series was shot with the intent to be seen through the lens of the most basic communication tool we have, our bodies. Embracing all of who she is in all her facets of being a Black Woman engaged on a journey, in the spiritual act of expression as God.