Oakland Art Murmur is proud to introduce the Emerging Artist Program as part of our biannual East Bay Open Studios. The Emerging Artist Program reflects Oakland Art Murmur’s commitment to cultivating creativity, diversity, and inclusivity within the East Bay’s vibrant arts community. The program is designed to support emerging visual artists who are at the beginning of their careers and have limited experience exhibiting and selling their work.
Meet Our Emerging Artists
Derick Davies (he/him) is an 18 year old African American Visual Artist from Oakland, California. Graduating this summer, Derick attends Oakland School for the Arts, where he expands his skills and artistic voice. Derick is a painter and his work focuses on self reflection and stories. In the fall he will be attending California College of the Arts on a full scholarship. He wants to become a known painter from the bay and will continue to work towards his dreams and goals.
Trisha Mah is a Chinese-Japanese American artist born and raised in the East Bay whose work as a collagist is a reflection of their identities, emotions, and dreams.
Drawing from their work as a youth worker and lifelong learner, Trisha sees creativity as a transformative tool—one that weaves through living, loving, laughing, and healing. The artist strives to create art that not only reflects my own journey but also affirms the creative potential within all of us.
Cameron Redd is a studio artist with an Associate’s degree in Ceramics from Laney College and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. Redd has built a body of work surrounding his love of nature and science on the wheel and through hand-built sculpture. In 2024, Redd resumed living in Oakland and working at Laney College’s Art Department.
Michela Colognese is a textile and fiber artist inspired by nature, movement, and mindfulness. Her work is experimental and intuitive, blending softness and intention to create pieces that invite connection and presence
Noah Johnson is an artist new to Berkeley, working with pen and watercolor, and nudging us to ponder the magnificence of our surroundings. Their work reflects on relationships to land and celebrates wonder. He creates imagined landscapes of the past, present, and future, rich in detail, color, and playful perspectives to re-elicit awe. Noah aspires to transform awareness of landscape change into intentional relationships with land, so we may blossom into uncertain futures.
Chloe Wanaselja (she/they) is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring how to build relationship with land on which they are a guest. Through sitting with trees, painting with the rain, and drawing on bark she seeks to situate herself within her ecology, embodying alternatives to capitalist hierarchy.
Roland Martin (he/they) is a painter and mixed media artist who has exhibited artwork around the Bay Area including Worth Ryder Art Gallery, the De Young Museum and the San Francisco Art Fair. Roland has a BA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently an assistant at Micki Meng Gallery. They are excited to participate in East Bay Open Studios.
Shreya Shankar’s practice is where ancestral forms and futurisms meet across the mediums of design, place-keeping, production, policy, myth-making and meaning-making.
Their work engages collective memory and the radical imagination, seamlessly prototyping across diverse mediums and forms to create functional ritual sculptural art objects, sets, and visual art.
Ngoc Nguyen is a gay Vietnamese American multidisciplinary artist based in Alameda. Working primarily in painting, he blends representation and abstraction through portraiture and figurative imagery to explore themes of identity, intimacy, and belonging. His practice centers on uplifting LGBTIQ AAPI experiences and creating spaces of visibility and empathy for marginalized voices. Through his work, Ngoc seeks to foster healing and connection by reclaiming narratives that celebrate community and the complexity of human experience.
Nadir Wright is a visual artist based in Oakland, California, whose acrylic and mixed media work explores color, whimsy, emotion, and alternate realities. Their layered compositions feature human-like characters and fantastical landscapes that challenge perceptions and invite imaginative freedom. Nadir’s process is rooted in sketching and intuition, often shaped by time spent near Bay Area waters with his partner and dog.
Ren Chanel Patrick is a Bay Area-based multidisciplinary artist working primarily in fiber and installation. Originally trained in visual storytelling through comics and photography, their work weaves together narrative, historical research, and textile traditions. Rooted in a positive obsession, their current work employs embroidery as a form of painterly expression to question the boundaries between art and craft, as well as the relationship between the fragmented and the whole.
Sheilby Macena is a Haitian-American photographer and visual storyteller based in Oakland, California. Rooted in the traditions of her family’s photo albums and the contrast between her upbringing in the United States and her family’s life in Haiti, her practice explores themes of memory, identity, and belonging. Through photography—particularly portraiture—she seeks to preserve, reimagine, and reclaim narratives within the Black diaspora.
Laurie Caird is an Oakland-based artist and designer. Her work explores our relationship to time, celebrating the Japanese concept of ichigo ichie – cherishing the present moment, as it will never be replicated – as well as themes of connection to nature, humanity, and joy through food. Caird enjoys collaborating with the materials she uses, responding to the behaviors of watercolor and paper in a way that amplifies their unique characteristics.
Guillermo Navarrete Davis is a self-taught painter born and raised in Santiago de Chile, and has lived in the Bay Area since 1998. Navarrete uses an ancient technique of mixing colors by painting the oils over wet layers on the canvas. As an indigenous Latino who has always been drawn to marginalized peoples, his work focuses on their often overlooked stories. The realism, the purity, and the sincerity of the sentiment expressed in the faces of his subjects are his source of inspiration. Navarrete’s paintings reflect life’s realities; suffering, love, struggle, joy, loneliness, tenderness and vulnerability.