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.

Kharyshi Wiginton

Kharyshi Wiginton is a dancer at heart, but an artist in nature. She has a BA in theatre arts/dance from Cal State San Bernardino and an MFA in Creative Inquiry from California Institute of Integral Studies. Kharyshi’s an interdisciplinary artist that has worked on Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, For Colored Girls, Pippin, and Godspell.
She was Artistic Director for Equal Opportunity Productions, and in 2003 she took 12 youth and 7 mentors to South Africa for the cultural exchange project SOZE II. In 2005, she went back to South Africa as a member of Colors of the Diaspora where she participated in an adult cultural exchange project and presented a show in the 2005 National Arts Festival in South Africa.
In 2008, Kharyshi established P.R.I.S.M. Dance Company. In 2012, she was part of the Black Choreographer’s Festival AMP program where she was commissioned to produce a 15-minute dance piece. In 2012, she traveled back to South Africa for Colors of the Diaspora II performing at the historic Market Theater Lab in Johannesburg. She’s a powerful artist with intense goals, and her personal identity and life experiences continue to fuel her creative process.
In 2009, Kharyshi received her MFA in Creative Inquiry from the California Institute of Integral Studies. For her final project, she created a one-woman show entitled "Too Much Woman For This World," and later spent several years honing that work under the tutelage of Master Teacher Ayodele Nzinga. Kharyshi has performed her solo show in 2018's Ubuntu Festival, in 2019's BAMBD Festival, in 2019's Iya Iya's House of Burning Souls, and in 2018's Vavasati International Women's Festival where she performed at the State Theater in South Africa. This is probably her biggest accomplishment to date!
More than anything, her art seeks to effect change. It tells stories of those rarely mentioned, empowers the broken-spirited, gives voice to those who cannot speak, and tackles difficult issues such as self-esteem, body image, and sizeism. Kharyshi is a fierce dancer, writer, spoken word artist, and hopes to one day become a dynamic, world-renowned choreographer.

Too Much…Too Little…Too Late!
“BLURB”
Too Much Woman for this World is the most recent creation in the world of “one woman shows.” Blending an entertaining mixture of theatre, dance, spoken word, and storytelling, this wonderful work of art is a new twist on an old tradition. It tackles uncomfortable issues such as body image, self-esteem, and family criticism in a way that will touch your heart, allowing you to laugh, cry, be proud of and become empowered with the main character.
This play is a brilliant look at identity through the lens of an adolescent girl who struggles with her weight, social pressures to be different, and finally coming to terms with being “Too Much Woman!” It is funny, provocative, honest, sexy, emotional, and sure to be a hit! Too Much Woman for this World is a “must see,” guaranteed to leave audiences asking one question… “Why wasn’t this play out sooner?”

Venus Morris

Venus is an Oakland native who aspires to inspire others. She is dedicated to pushing the agenda of "Radical healing" forward into communities across the nation through art, cultural empowerment, self-awareness and experimental workshops, activism, advocacy, and philanthropy.

She had always taken pictures with her eyes. Before she ever even touched a camera. She saw the beauty that nobody else could see. Moments in time that she had frozen in her mind, saved to only her memory. As she got older, Venus knew that she had the gift of vision. It took her a while to say that to herself aloud. However, since then She has been in several art exhibitions and Is blessed beyond measurement to be able to share the frozen moments in her memory with her beloved community.

Traci Bartlow

As an Oakland native Traci Bartlow has traveled the world as a performance and visual artist and returned home to currently be the owner and operator of B-Love’s Guest House. She is a dancer, choreographer, poet, photographer, and cultural archivist who documents and preserves African American art and culture through dance and visual art.

Traci @ 50 is a series of nude portraits artist Traci Bartlow commissioned PhotoVangelist Saddi Khali to shoot for her 50th birthday. Ms. Bartlow is an aging athlete; a dancer and choreographer who has presented her dance works on local and international stages for decades. These images were shot at Salt Point National Park in Northern California. Here on the coast of the Pacific Ocean Ms. Bartlow, an eco-feminist, activist, and healer vibes with her natural surroundings in the nude. This spectacular natural environment is a location she frequents for hiking, camping, and healing rituals. Traci Bartlow states, 'Turning 50 was a profound moment in my life full of introspection of the many ways my body has served me in my purpose. Being naked in nature is liberating, empowering, and heightens the experience of connecting with mother earth.' The photographer Saddi Khali is a Visual Alchemist/Philosopher who photographs black women in the nude in the act of what he calls 'decolonizing beauty'. Styling is by Chun-Mui Miller.

Tasha Dougé

Tasha Dougé is a Bronx-based conceptual mixed-media artist, teaching artist, and cultural vigilante. Her work incites conversations around women, health advocacy, sexual education, societal "norms," identity, and Black pride. As a proud Black woman of Haitian descent, it's very important and fundamental to her practice to depict a more holistic description of who Black people are and what they have contributed overall. She has been featured in The New York Times, Essence Magazine, and Sugarcane Magazine. She has shown nationally at the RISD Museum (Providence), The Apollo Theater (Harlem), and Rush Arts Gallery (Philadelphia). Internationally, Dougé has shown at the Hygiene Museum in Germany. She is an alum of the Laundromat Project's Create Change Fellowship, Urban Bush Women's Summer Leadership Institute, The Studio Museum of Harlem's Museum Education Program, and the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute's Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship.

They See {God} I Am is a series capturing Tasha Dougé's visual transformation into the God/Sacred being that she knows Black women to be. Honoring that Black bodies belong everywhere and anywhere, her transfiguration happened in the middle of Times Square during a pandemic. With the gaze of hundreds, she stood proudly in her divinity with a reminder that her ancestors are still with her (Haitian face mask). This series is a collaboration of her body & spirit, the gaze of one of the photographers and a stranger she met that day. They Know We Are {Gods} We Are.

Koren Martin

Koren Martin is a Philadelphia based photographer originally from Atlantic City, NJ. Her interest in photography was first fostered as a child by vivid portraits captured by her paternal grandfather who owned a photography business. She loves photography for its power to preserve the moment and propagate vivid storytelling.

Her photography is guided by capturing an intimate moment that may go unnoticed by many, but that time reveal has boundless meaning. Koren’s gaze has been cultivated by her connection to home and rooted in deep spirituality. Her photography interests meet at the intersection of activism, advocacy, and love for her ancestors and the African Diaspora. She documents the shifting legacies of communities of color via portraiture, documentary, and street photography. Koren Martin has worked on several documentary film projects as a teaching assistant and also sound… She has also received an honorable mention in MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, an exclusive and commemorative biannual journal committed to establishing and representing a collective voice of women photographers of African descent.

Koren Martin has created an on-going photo series celebrating the Divine Feminine with portraits of Black Women. The series is grounded in the majesty of womanhood and also the beautiful strength of Black Women. The portraits take the viewer on a journey from the African Drumming Circle in Washington DC to the subway of Harlem, New York.

Val Kai

Val Kai is a multi-dimensional Photographer, born and raised in the SF/Oakland Bay Area. She was exposed to Art (all kinds) at an early age via her parents, who were Music and Art enthusiast. Val started expressing herself with Photography in high school.

But it was after high school when an opportunity presented itself. Thus a serious interest ensued. She's been a work in progress ever since. Learning, working on her own with very little formal study or training. A one-word description that best describes Val's work is VARIETY. As a result her portfolio contains many areas of focus.

Val has exhibited work in venues/galleries around the Bay Area since 2010; SF Photography Ctr., Dia De Los Muertos & TBWIG @ SOMARTS Ctr., City of Oakland Senior Month Art Exhibit and The Art of the African Disapora (formally TAOLB), to name a few.

She is constantly out and about photographing various cultural and community events. Street, environmental/architectural Art is also a serious interest of hers.

In addition to Photography, Val has an extensive background in Dance. She is 1 of the 1st string of dancers that studied African/Black Dance in the Bay Area at its onset in the late 60's, early 70's. Val has studied and performed with the likes of CK Ladzekpo, Rev/Dr Albirda Rose Eberhardt, Malonga Casque-Lourd, Nontsizi Cayou, Blanche Brown and Jose Lorenzo to name a few.

The work I've chosen for this exhibit are pieces that reflect my current state of mind or development. Some exploration beyond traditional photography. The use of both traditional and my own creative twist.
My state of mind is that of many today. Living in and with an extreme RACIST society making Black more fragile, vulnerable to unexpected incidents that can result in death. Having to rethink, reconfigure our individual lives, in order to survive in a world that's HATE filled with a pandemic (COVID19).
As a Black female creative, I carry, express, reclaiming, reconfiguring, and re-remembering in and with my Art.