Artists’ Reception – Familiar Strangers

Join Manna Gallery in celebrating the opening of Familiar Strangers, a group exhibition featuring Devynn Barnes, Madelyn Covey, Monica Guillory, Pamela Mooney, Jillian Shea, Julianne Sterling, and Deirdre White. Meet the artists and be among the first to experience this thoughtful exploration of memory, identity, and image through contemporary figurative painting. The reception offers an opportunity to connect, ask questions, and engage with the work in a lively, informal setting.

May 16 – June 20, 2026
Artists’ Reception: Saturday, May 16, 2-4 pm
Gallery Hours: Saturdays, 12-5 pm & First Fridays, 5-8 pm

Devynn Barnes is an Oakland-based painter, visual artist, and archivist. Through her multi-disciplinary work, she transforms archival fragments into portals of Afro-surreal conjure, restoring suppressed Black queer presence and imagining landscapes of collective homecoming. Barnes invites viewers to confront their own narratives, encouraging a collective awakening, communal (melanated) homecoming, and admittance to our interconnected archives.

Monica Guillory paints from vintage photographs, transforming fleeting moments of intimacy and joy into layered compositions that mirror the fragility and emotional elasticity of memory—where figures emerge, dissolve, and persist through time.

Madelyn Covey paints portraits of friends and family that examine the performance of identity within intimate, domestic spaces. Working on found wallpaper, she builds visual relationships between subject and surface, creating textured reflections on connection, care, and the subtle ways we inhabit our roles.

Pamela Mooney reconfigures found imagery into compositions that are at once familiar and disorienting. Through distortion, color disruption, and chance, her work challenges viewers to unravel embedded meanings while considering the impact our cultural narratives have on the possibilities of the future.

Jillian Shea captures nightlife scenes as sites of tension and agency, where visibility and performance collide. Her paintings reframe femme presence as active and resistant, emphasizing camaraderie and autonomy within spaces shaped by the dynamics of looking and being looked at.

Julianne Wallace Sterling’s recent paintings are inspired by photos she took on vacation with her family. These photos are of cherished memories and travels with loved ones. These paintings begin in an atmospheric location but quickly dive into magical imaginings of place through light, floral design, and shadow. Sterling’s work is fundamentally portraiture, but she has been exploring the figure in the complexity of cityscapes.

Deirdre White constructs poetic, often unsteady worlds drawn from memory, landscape, and imagination. Her paintings weave personal and collective narratives of life in the American West, where grief, wonder, and resilience coexist within scenes of quiet upheaval.