Keena Azania Romano exercises her creative mind through the exploration of diverse artistic mediums as a way to engage and understand individual and collective purpose. Her Murals can be spotted from Sacramento, California, to Richmond, Virginia to Oaxaca, Mexico. Inspired by cultural practices, Romano combines spirituality with urban experience to produce work that draws upon the quest for a greater understanding of intersectional beauty in this world. She fuses traditional native arts with contemporary inner-city techniques to reflect a new language that encourages the healing and empowerment process between community members and their environments. Her style is described as “vibrant and insightful.” She aspires to travel and create a colorful trail of art by exploring the modern Diaspora based on her multiethnic experience.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Inspired by the Global Arts Movement, I work to strengthen the Bay Area’s contribution to visual representation of culture. My artwork incorporates esoteric themes, color theory and blends concepts such as urban experiences with historical, modern, and futuristic realities. I create Public Art to encourage dialogue within the community and transcend the urban landscape. Working with my art collectives Few & Far Women and Los Pobres Artistas, I utilize paints, stencils, natural objects and various other mediums to create a multi-ethnic lens that aims to embody the colorful, healing and hopeful reality of both present and future urban lifestyle.

I have been an active teaching artist for the past nine years in the Bay Area facilitating interactive mural projects on and off campuses and preparing students for the professional art world. Working for organizations such as the Attitudinal Healing Connection and Richmond Art Center, I had the opportunity to work with different school sites and community events such as: a. Life is Living, Art & Soul Festival, Friday Night Live, Marcus Foster School and others. It is amazing to witness how the mural making process brings community together, allows us to discover talents and strengthens our connection to our neighborhoods and creative culture.

Karima is a celebrated author, illustrator, and essayist, and has written on a variety of subjects not limited to creative courage, perseverance, environmentalism, art, food, transformation, and trolls. In 1997 she founded an independent imprint, Dromedary Press. She has published eight illustrated books, as well as having her work featured in various publications. Karima’s books have won numerous awards and nominations, including the Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY), the International Rubery Book Award, and Indie Reader. She has twice been an honoree at the Authors Dinner for the Berkeley Public Library Foundation.

Karima’s personal motto is “Believe in the fantasy and make it real.” To that end she has attended the Carnevale di Venezia several times, manifesting fantasy in the form of characters from her own imagination. She spends months in advance crafting elaborate costumes from the ground up, delighting in the process as much as the result. The ability to turn nothing into something, using only the tools and skills that you already possess, is an addictively alchemic transformative power to practice and wield.

www.cammellot.com

Nicholas Coley was born in Connecticut in 1971 and raised in Muir Beach, California. He hitch hiked around the states for a couple years after high school trying to find Don Juan and Carlos Castenada. He was sure he had a destiny to become a medicine man or a brujo, but after getting hepatitis in a hostel in Santa Fe, he moved to Europe and studied art at the Beaux-Arts plus another small school for painting in the south of France. He lived, studied, and meditated daily for a year in a Buddhist Monastery outside of Bordeaux. After reading The Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller, he decided he was not meant for the disciplined, monastic life and went off in search for a more creative and spontaneous world, taking him to Prague for a year and selling paintings to tourists on the Charles Bridge. From there he took the Trans-Siberian Railroad through Russia and deep into China before having a complete spiritual collapse in the summer of ’94. The good news is it’s been a slow climb back up the mountain toward the beneficence and belonging of a higher power. Anchored by the love of a good woman he’s actually been able to support his family, three extraordinary little kids (and seven chickens) even putting a down payment on a house ... all exclusively with the proceeds from painting sales, which he’s damn proud of and still sort of in dumb happy shock. For almost 20 years now he has been painting full time, almost everyday. Turns out, he was something of a medicine man after all.

www.nicholascoley.com

Hillary Combs is a surrealist portrait and abstract paint-pouring artist. Her primary medium is acrylic on canvas.

www.facebook.com/HillaryCombsArt

www.instagram.com/hillarycombsart

Diana Coopersmith, welder and ironworker, has walked across much of the San Francisco skyline — from strolling across the Moscone Center West’s steel beams at dusk to making sparks fly as the Federal Building’s frame rose into the downtown sky to pushing through the fog while walking the main cable of the Golden Gate Bridge.

When she joined the ironworker’s union in the 1990s, she was one of only three women with the job. Today, as an industrial artist at her company, DC Metalwork in Petaluma, Diana blends art, architecture and industry techniques to create custom steel gates, fences, spiral stair railings, garden benches, planters and interior furnishings and décor for Bay Area homes and restaurants. She’s currently working with another San Francisco native, monumental metal sculptor Richard Serra, to install his 14-foot-high, 90-foot-long, 100-ton wall-like sculpture that curves over the grounds of a private collector in Atherton.

Teaching kids to weld, especially girls, is Diana’s other passion. 

www.dianacoopersmith.com

Daniele Frazier is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Originally from Mill Valley, California, she graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2007 where she received the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust Award. Daniele has created 10 unique public artworks and maintains a studio where she makes sculptures and drawings. Her process intersects her interest in formal aesthetics with a research-based and socially-engaged practice. She focuses on themes of ecology, climate change, natural history, art history, and social critique. Daniele’s work humorously addresses the politics inherent to public art itself such as gender inequality, the difference between public and private space, and the definition of ownership.

Daniele has worked extensively with the NYC Parks Department and her work has been shown at The Queens Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Guild & Greyshkul, Museum 52, Rivington Arms, Ritter Zamet, and Gavin Brown’s Passerby, among others.

www.danielefrazier.com

Erika Gomi currently works in production at Paramount Animation and was previously at Cartoon Network Studios. She now resides in Los Angeles where she likes to find free food, explore new neighborhood cafes, and window-shop
for Jellycats.

www.erikagomi.com

Janet Jacobs is a San Francisco Bay Area artist and art teacher. She received a BFA in Drawing and Printmaking from the California College of the Arts and an MFA in Sculpture and Painting from Mills College.

She grew up in San Francisco after spending some of her childhood living in India and traveling to places like London, and Rome. She absorbed the sounds and textures, colors and movements of these foreign places, taking quiet internal notes and learning how to observe. 

At Mills College Janet was one of two main teachers for the artist Jay DeFeo, and later on was Chair of the Art Department at the Urban School of San Francisco. She continues teaching private classes from her studio in San Anselmo, CA. She has offered a workshop and retreat, Draw Breath, which combines art making with healing. She has also created an intimate summer landscape painting retreat in Sweden called Landscape and Light Retreat.

Relationships with family, other artists, and the natural landscape play a central role in her creative process. She is inspired by annual trips to Sweden with her family. The delight of being out in the field, working directly from the landscape, feeds both her inner life and the studio work back home. 

Janet and her 94-year-old Dad have met once a month for years to paint or draw, sitting in the front seats of her car at Fort Baker or in Golden Gate Park. These hours have been very dear to both of them.

www.janetjacobs.com 

Sarah Klein is a visual artist working in animation and printmaking. Informed by a decade of working in stop-motion, she continues to expand on the language of movement within print-based works. Using image sequences and repeated forms, she creates compositions that highlight the parts that make up the whole. Klein has presented internationally in galleries, museums, media outlets, and film festivals including the Mill Valley Film Festival, Exploratorium, and Telematic in the San Francisco Bay Area; Anthology Film Archives and Transmitter Gallery in New York; Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit; Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb; Festival Tweetakt in Utrecht; General Public in Berlin. She has received awards from the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding and Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Grant. In 2017-2018 she received a Media Arts Residency Award from the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA. Most recently Klein worked in partnership with the Jim Campbell Studio and Boston Properties to create a site-specific animation for the Salesforce Tower Top.

www.sarahklein.com

John Muir Laws is a principal leader and innovator of the worldwide nature journaling movement. He is a naturalist, artist, and educator who has dedicated his work to connecting people to nature through art and science. From an early age, his parents instilled in him a deep love and respect for nature. Over the years, that love has grown into a commitment to stewardship and a passion to share the delight of exploring nature with others. As both a scientist and artist, Laws has developed interdisciplinary programs that train students to observe with rigor and to refine techniques to become intentionally curious. He is the founder and president of the Wild Wonder Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging nature connection and conservation through attention, curiosity, art, science, and community.

He teaches nature study and natural history workshops that incorporate illustration and scientific note-taking as a means to greater observation, memory, and curiosity. Laws is the founder and host of the Nature Journal Club, a family-friendly, intergenerational community that connects with nature through art and field journaling. He teaches free, weekly online workshops on nature journaling techniques and supports teachers and parents to develop best practices to teach nature journaling to kids and adults. He shares videos of the classes online with an international community of nature artists. The entire program is free and supported by donations and grants. He is also a primary author and editor of the interdisciplinary curriculum: Opening the World through Nature Journaling. This standards-based curriculum is student-tested and teacher-approved and merges science, language arts, and visual arts by teaching students to keep a nature journal. This resource, now in its second edition, is free to educators and has been downloaded and used worldwide in schools, science centers, home-school communities, camps, and informal science education programs.

Laws has written and illustrated several books including The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling (2016), The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds (2012), Sierra Birds: a Hiker’s Guide (2004), The Laws Guide to the Sierra Nevada (2007), and The Laws Pocket Guide Set to the San Francisco Bay Area (2009). He is a regular contributor to Bay Nature magazine with his “Naturalist’s Notebook” column.

His work has been nationally recognized. He is a research associate of the California Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the Conservationist of the Year by the John Muir Association in 2024. He was given the 2020 Bay Nature Local Hero Award for his work in environmental education. In 2009, he received the Terwilliger Environmental Award for outstanding service in Environmental Education. He is a 2010 TogetherGreen Conservation Leadership Fellow with the National Audubon Society. He was the 2011 artist for International Migratory Bird Day. In 2011 he was the Educator of the Year for the California Institute for Biodiversity. He was the 2013 Nature’s Inspiration Honoree, Committee for Green Foothills. He was the 2010 Outstanding Learning Disabled Achiever. He was honored by the Lab School of Washington D.C., in recognition of his contributions and achievements and as an example for children with learning disabilities.

www.johnmuirlaws.com

Hailey Meyer Liechty is an accomplished artist specializing in calligraphy and ceramics. With a zeal for teaching, she offers classes to share her skills and inspire others. She has been a substitute teacher and a volunteer reading tutor. Hailey’s involvement in media production includes producing radio and podcast segments.

Hailey is the mother of five grown children and a San Francisco native. She is a dog lover and a dedicated zero-waste advocate. She currently resides in Utah. When she’s not creating art or teaching, Hailey works at a public library in the children’s department, where her creativity and gumption shine through in her daily interactions and activities. She is grateful for her experiences at the Urban High School of San Francisco and the encouragement and examples of very special teachers.

LIFE - Beezher (aka Marisa McFarlane) identifies as an Irish-Jamaican-American woman and bisexual. She was born, raised, and still lives in San Francisco, California. She is inspired by life and the lives of her friends and family. She graduated from Urban School of San Francisco in ’01. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology from Pomona College, ’05 and a Master’s Degree in Ethnomusicology from UCLA, ’08. Her mother’s Punk and Reggae roots as a musician (Animal Things) and Rock Journalist (SadieO - SF Weekly) inspired her love of music and art. Her father’s career as Jamaican Reggae singer / percussionist (Ras Kidus - Bionic Roots) sparked her interest in the roots and routes of Reggae-Dancehall in particular.

MUSIC - Beezher’s sound is a collection of Hip-Hop and World Music forms including Spoken-Word, Classic R&B, Jazz, Reggae-Dancehall, Soca, Dubstep, Brazilian, Latin, and Indian / Southeast Asian with an overall Soul-Funk-Electro feel. She produces, plays percussion, sings, raps and does spoken-word.

ACTING - Beezher is an actor with experiences and interests in theater, short films, feature films, television, internet, promos, and voice-over work. You can see her acting credits on IMDB.com.

ART - Beezher is writing a book series of spoken-word with illustrations, she does mixed media art including documentary videos, makes creations on canvas with upcycled watch pieces including jewelry and paintings, she does photography, graphic design, as well as infographics / data visualization, and website design.

She has a fashion / art shop called Beezher’s Bazaar.

www.beezher.com

I began making images of women in nature as a photo student at the San Francisco Art Institute by studying female archetypes. Spurred on by my favorite teacher and mentor, Linda Connor, I started by making self-portraits and eventually moved into collaborations with other photographers and models. My work is influenced by photographers Francesca Woodman, Judy Dater, Ana Maria Mendieta, Bellocq, and Sally Mann, who all use the body as a language. I continue to explore my state of mind and the female form to push against the male gaze- to create images that express strength, vulnerability, and intimacy. 

Since completing my MFA in 2021 at UC Davis in Design, my work has evolved into exhibition design, curation and book design. Currently I’m curating an exhibition for the Museum of Sonoma County about the San Francisco Art Institute alumni.

www.judemooney.com

Brian Murphy attended The Urban School of San Francisco along with his brothers Patrick and Aaron. His father Dan Murphy taught English and History at Urban for over 50 years. Brian graduated from Yale with an English degree and worked as a copywriter after college. His true passion was in the kitchen, and began a professional cooking career at Oliveto in Oakland. 

He always enjoyed drawing, and as the Executive Chef at Nostrana in Portland, OR, contributed artwork for the menu. He has returned to the Bay Area, and now lives in Petaluma. He works as an R&D Chef for Amy’s Kitchen, and continues to draw and paint, primarily working in Adobe Fresco.

Instagram: @hellomurphy

Kristina Nobleman is a multidisciplinary artist who works with textiles, ink and paper. Improvisation is an important part of her practice and forms the basis for large-scale monotype prints, collage, and sculptural paper pieces exploring the aesthetic and sensory possibilities that fiber has to offer. Kristina studied liberal arts at Sarah Lawrence College, NY. She subsequently worked in New York as a fashion designer, and later held teaching and management positions at the Textile Arts Center, Manhattan before moving home to Northern California to establish an independent studio practice. She has exhibited in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, where her work was selected for the deYoung Museum’s 2020 + 2023 de Young Open Exhibitions. Her work is in the collections of The Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the De Young Museum/Legion of Honor, San Francisco as well as The Ritz-Carlton Santa Barbara, Stanly Ranch Napa, and private collections nationally. She is on the Board of Directors for the California Society of Printmakers in charge of portfolio review.

www.kristinanobleman.com

I wandered into abstract a little over a year ago, after my budding years as a painter were devoted to seeking imagery. One of my teachers, Flora Bowley, an intuitive painter whose body of work combines abstract and imagery, offers to those whose comfort zone is painting images to try on shapes and textures in abstraction — conversely, she offers to those whose comfort zone is painting in abstract to try on images. I’ve tended to lean toward the former, having frivolously deemed abstract as easy art.

Once I have a solid base layer of drips, splats, strokes, and scratches, I tend to leave it for a few days — let it breathe. I return to the canvas with a few colors I am craving and make them dance with various shapes, textures, stencils, and blendings. I constantly scan about the canvas and sections I crinkle my nose at, I paint over — sections I like, I keep. At some point in this layering process, when I would have previously sought imagery, I now seek cohesion and synergy. What cohesion is changes depending on the feeling I seek to capture in that piece — it could be chaos, it could be ease, it could be anger, it could be pleasure ... More and more, I have embraced the pursuit of cohesion — repeating shapes I like, maybe even doing three paintings in a row with a similar palette. My use of color has evolved tremendously. In earlier years of painting, I used as much color as possible — free, yet unsustainable. Now, I take ample more time in identifying what fewer colors I can still achieve the same level of lifeness with.

I have discovered the following throughout my continued journey of painting: the process of painting imagery for me represents a safety net of the familiar — that which I can predict — that which is not good nor bad, just familiar; whereas the process of painting abstract requires a distinct flavor of surrender whereby I dance in the liminal space of too-muchness and non-enoughness. This dance is not particularly graceful. And yet, there is grace to be found in it.

www.sanfranciscoartists.com/rose

San Francisco Upcycled Artist

My practice uses upcycled materials to comment on the nature of our consumerism. Our capitalism has created a thirst for the “new product” that has rendered us numb to an increasingly high turnover of resources. Possessions turn to trash in the blink of an eye so they can be replaced with a newer version. This waste of our finite resources will catch up with us, and I aim to highlight this fact to help bring it into conversation.

I work with paper, and create art with anything on its way to disregard; never using brand new materials. My undergraduate years were full of the social sciences and taught me about the concept of sustainability. Renewable energy became a focus of mine, but the financial aspect of the energy industry deterred me from pursuing a career in the field. Art became my way back into promoting a sustainable consciousness. My work is full of like images meshing together to create symbols and visual puzzles. Sometimes my work is thoroughly mapped out, other times it is more free flowing and abstract. I am inspired by individuals, young and old, who have accomplished amazing things, who had the courage to commit to a big change in their lives, or maybe to face a fear of heights. I aim to help make those kinds of leaps more conceivable, with conversation and art.

ian@artbayarea.com

www.sanfranciscoartists.com/ian

@ianglues on Instagram

I’m Tessa Kay Madsen Petrich and I grew up in Montara, on the coast just south of San Francisco. Coming from a background in Architecture, I deeply appreciate the intersection between form and function. I just finished two years at The Krenov School of Fine Woodworking in Fort Bragg. My first year I made Even Keel, a walnut wood wall cabinet dedicated to my grandpa who was a boat builder. I also made Juicy Details, a pear wood writing desk to invite us to write letters and journal. I was selected to continue at the school for a second year and become a mentor to first-year students. During my second year I made With Love, a madrone and walnut wood chest of drawers to hold precious papers. I also made the KAM chair, a madrone wood chair I designed and built to fit my mom, a piece of furniture to hold the one who held me as a child. Being at The Krenov School has inspired me to create human-scale furniture/objects that invite interaction and spark joy. My dream is to reignite the connection between us and our built environment through thoughtful craft and careful detailing. I am currently a licensed Architect in the state of California and watercolor artist.

www.t-kmp.com/about-1

Leah lives in the Boulder, Colorado area and finds inspiration in the everyday beauty of nature. She works in acrylics and digital drawing. Her art dances between nonobjective paintings and more representational botanicals. She shows her art locally and enjoys selling her art at art fairs and online on her Etsy shop leahprusinerart.etsy.com.

Noam Rappaport received his BFA from The School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1997. He has exhibited his paintings both domestically and internationally. His works are included in several public collections including The Berkeley Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Orange County Museum of Art and the Rubell Family Collection.

www.noamrappaport.com

André Renay, a San Francisco native, draws inspiration from the diverse tapestry of his upbringing and Caribbean roots. Raised in a city known for its cultural vibrancy, Renay’s artistic journey is a testament to the rich influences that shaped his identity. His mother’s Grenadian heritage and his father’s strong work ethic form the foundation of his artistic ethos. 

Renay discovered his passion for painting as a profound outlet for emotional expression. The canvas became his sanctuary, a space within his family’s garage where feelings found voice in strokes of color and form. The fusion of his Caribbean heritage and the urban dynamism of San Francisco infuses his work with a unique energy, capturing the essence of his multifaceted identity. 

The unpredictability of Renay’s creative process mirrors the spontaneity of life itself. Never preconceiving what will emerge, he allows the painting to reveal itself organically. This approach not only reflects his commitment to embracing uncertainty but also mirrors the complexity and unpredictability of the human experience.

In each stroke, Renay explores the intersection of his personal narrative and broader cultural influences. His work becomes a reflection of the amalgamation of diverse elements that have shaped him — a synthesis of Caribbean warmth, San Francisco cool, and the emotional depth of a self-discovering artist. His art is an invitation to journey through the vivid, ever-evolving landscapes of his inner world.

www.fashodre.com

Using an appealing Pop palate, Kadie Salfi depicts objects of depredation, destruction, and desire. From her early silk-screens of bubblegum-hued bomber planes to her series of Arabian camels printed on brightly-dyed plaster with pure crude oil, Salfi presents trenchant social and personal commentary with a sly stylishness. Throughout the 2010s, she put American gun culture in the crosshairs: trophy species were rendered in Ben-Day dots and various models of firearms were painted with lustrous splashes of over-the-counter beauty products and captioned with unsettling statements of provenance or prophecy: “To kill his wife” or “To kill your daughter.” This ongoing project culminated in Every Sixteen Hours, a solo show at Brooklyn’s pioneering A.I.R. Gallery, after which Salfi reached back into her own family remembrances to create Sweet Tender Love, her most personal —and yet her most broadly resonant — series of work to date.

Salfi studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and spent two years at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, where she printed editions of original graphics for such contemporary masters as Rauschenberg, Celmins, and Johns. Salfi maintains a steady studio practice in Ithaca, New York and has held numerous solo exhibitions on both coasts.

www.kadiesalfi.com

I realize now that I have been creating a nature diary or perhaps I will call it a memorial. My pictures show the natural world, resilient yet fragile, and the immense significance and necessity of its protection. The possibility of finding pristine, unpolluted, undying beauty inspires and encourages me. 

Weather is an essential element in my mostly black and white images about nature: a chilly and wintry December, a deeply frozen snowy season, and summer, a warm nostalgic comfort soon to pass leaving only its memory. I ask myself how the weather feels, and checking daily becomes a fresh reminder signifying the passing of time. Every day risks uncertainty. Yet we can be optimistic about the possibilities even while accepting unpredictability. 

www.betsyweis.com

I am an illustrator and surface pattern designer who recently graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art. I am currently interested in creating art that can be used and enjoyed by people in their everyday lives. Painting on jeans or bags is just one of the ways that I am exploring this. My main focus at the moment is greeting cards and seed packets but I have always been interested in fashion and will most likely explore it in the future.

www.hannahrworsley.com

Alex Zecca was born in San Francisco in 1970. He studied at California College of the Arts (formerly CCAC) and in Florence Italy before earning his BFA and MFA at The San Francisco Art Institute in Painting (1994/1996). He currently lives and works in Los Angeles. The central focus of his new work continues to be about Process. His drawings are the result of specific, cumulative, sequences of handmade inked lines on paper. And paintings with similar processes on linen mounted plywood panels. His practice is a specific and exacting methodology. It is an exercise in focus and precision. Color mixing by way of these systems is the focus of the works’ visual intrigue. 

www.alexzecca.com