Museum of Sonoma County features Black artists of the Bay Area in new exhibit

A museum’s mission is to open the world to its visitors. Sometimes that means bridging distances of thousands of miles. It also can mean overcoming expanses in exposure and experience.

“Collective Arising: The Insistence of Black Bay Area Artists,” opening Saturday at the Museum of Sonoma County in downtown Santa Rosa, offers views of the world not often seen in Sonoma County.

“One of the things that is beautiful about going into the gallery of the museum is that people have made the decision to go through a portal to be enlightened,” said the exhibit’s guest co-curator, Ashara Ekundayo.

Curated by Ekundayo and Lucia Olubunmi R. Momoh, the exhibit features works by 11 interdisciplinary, multigenerational artists, who all have belonged to Black, femme and queer artist collectives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“I think it’s important for the museum to provide a platform for sharing the work and story of Black artists’ collectives that have been working for decades, trying to address racial inequality and social inequities,” said Jeff Nathanson, executive director of the Museum of Sonoma County.

The idea for the current exhibit was sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, and the resulting protests, Nathanson said. It seeks to promote understanding about racial and social issues.

“I spoke to Lucia, who was part of our exhibitions committee, about putting together an exhibit, and two years later, here we are,” he said. “I think the museum has an important responsibility, especially because we are a museum of both art and history.”

The guest curators, invited by the museum because of their expertise and involvement with East Bay artist collectives, hope to introduce work to Sonoma County that has not been seen here before.

“This exhibit was assembled especially for this audience in Sonoma County, and we hope to excite all of our artists to come up to this area in the future,” Ekundayo said.

Her co-curator Momoh added, “It will be interesting to highlight a connection between Sonoma County and the Black community of the East Bay.”

The Black artist collective movement dates back to the 1960s and ’70s. The collectives represented in this exhibit include nure, 3.9 collective, House of Malico, CTRL+SHIFT collective and the recently formed Black [Space] Residency.

“There is something powerful for Black people in gathering and working collectively because that was something denied us during the era of slavery,” Momoh said.

Participating artists include Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Sydney Cain (also known as sage stargate), Erica Deeman, Cheryl Derricotte, Sasha Kelley, shah noor hussein, Ramekon O’Arwisters, Yétúndé Olagbaju, Karen Seneferu, Muzae Sesay and Adrian Octavius Walker.

“I am artist from outside of Oakland, and I have worked with a lot of the artists in this exhibit,” Branfman-Verissimo said. “It shows not only the artists independently but also the work of the collectives that are intertwined artistically in the Bay Area. In order for Black artists to survive, we need to work together.”

For this exhibit, Branfman-Verissimo is painting an on-site mural on the building’s roll-up doors that can be seen both inside and outside the museum.

“I am interested in ways the public can interact with the show,” the artist said. “Folks who are walking by can be part of it.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On Twitter @danarts.