History shows that it’s during some of the most trying times that the greatest art is created. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the Bay Area’s artistry is still thriving, and many creatives are using this time to their advantage.
Sign up for The Bold Italic newsletter to get the best of the Bay Area in your inbox every week.
The fundamental basis of art is to capture, process, and channel our emotional state. As we have already seen with protest art in Oakland and across major cities, the role of the artist is to catalog our current social conditions.
Here are some Bay Area artists that are remaining inspired and, despite difficult times, continuing in their life’s work. Remember that many artists are suffering financially; here are ways to support artists in the community directly:
Sephora Woldu: Filmmaker
Based in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, Woldu has lived in the city since 2007 and describes her studio as her creative cave.
“The Tenderloin gave me an opportunity to take my craft seriously… as there are crosscurrents and a convergence of lifestyles. It’s not always pretty and perfect, but it’s real,” Woldu said. “To me, art is a call and response.”
During this pandemic, Woldu has been working on her next feature film, Aliens in Eritrea, a prequel to her 2018 feature film Life is Fare, which explores the varying diasporic perspectives of Eritrea. This week, Woldu’s upcoming film got accepted into the Independent Film Project which champions the future of storytelling by connecting film, series, digital and audio artists with essential resources at all stages of development through distribution. The prequel, Aliens in Eritrea, will focus on the lives and origins of the characters from the first feature film and will be set in the ’90s. Two direct products of the shelter-in-place orders are the filming of a socially distanced music video with SF-based punk rock band Trash Vampires and her newly published book, Adventures in the Art of Rejection, which is a manifest of sorts where Woldu tries to convince herself that it’s worth going after opportunities after facing rejections. This is what propelled her to keep moving forward in writing the script for her upcoming film.
To support and keep up with Woldu’s upcoming film and projects, join her mailing list on her website abyssurdian.com. You can find her on Instagram at @abyssurdian.
Dorian Katz: Illustrator and comic artist
Based in Oakland, Katz has been in the Bay Area since 1986. Her drawings center around an alter ego called “Poppers the Pony,” which was inspired by the early HIV/AIDs crisis in the 1980s and ’90s. During the lockdown, Katz completed a public art project that is set to debut next month in San Francisco’s Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District. It will feature drawings of mischievous animals who discreetly express their sexual desires with the hanky code, a symbolic code of queer leather culture. Outside of this, she is developing an outline for a comic book about the Center for Sex and Culture, a queer community space lost in 2019 where she was the gallery director for eight years.
You can visit Katz’s online store to commission her, view artwork that is for sale, and keep up with Poppers the Pony. You can visit her Instagram page at @poppers_the_pony.
Miah Jeffra: Writer, curator, and educator
Jeffra is based in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland and has been in the Bay for 10 years. His work is geared toward activism. He explores the way advertisements are used to manipulate the population and has a satirical element that pokes fun at institutions. “My writing is a little bit more personal and is a way for me to process the world in a way that I think is fair. If I had to put a label on it, my work is artivism,” Jeffra said.
During this time, his work has mainly been reflective and healing essays that convey gratitude to make sure he does not become a victim of the circumstance. “Everything has become so politicized, and I am writing a lot of new characters in my new novel who are Trump supporters… I am going to try to understand them,” he said. Some of these characters will mimic his own family members, and he credits the pandemic for forcing him to reckon with this. “Something needs to be bridged if we really are going to make change,” Jeffra said.
You can support Jeffra by purchasing his new book, The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic, published by Sibling Rivalry. The book is all about perception and meditates how we are perceiving the world right now in this limited vantage point. You can visit his website at miahjeffra.com.
Bryon Mayhew: Guitarist, singer, and songwriter
Mayhew is a Bay Area native currently based in American Canyon.
“My approach is to be as honest as I can because people are going to connect and resonate with that. There is a line that connects us all on a spiritual level,” Mayhew said.
He credits San Francisco in helping him discover more about himself as well as the travel that expanded his understanding of the world. The pandemic has been difficult on him creatively but gave him a moment to pause and explore what motivates him as he has been operating on autopilot for some time.
“This moment in time has been helping me refocus and get my confidence back, as now my music is coming from the core as opposed to having to put on a show for people,” Mayhew said. “This pandemic really got me reminiscent of why I got music — which was me being a Black man and being excluded from certain spaces in my homeschooling community.”
To support Mayhew, you can listen to his music on major music platform services (Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube Music). You can view and share his newest studio session recorded at Complex Studios here.
Rachel Wolfe Goldsmith: Multidisciplinary artist
Wolfe-Goldsmith is based in American Canyon, but her studio and art centers are around Oakland. She has been living in the Bay Area for nine years.
“My move to the Bay Area was to expand my artistic potential, be in a place where I was not going to be othered, and build community with other Black people,” Wolfe-Goldsmith said.
Her art centers around empowering women, people of color, and femme-identifying people. At this current moment, her work focuses on aiding the global revolution against White supremacy, conveying a warrior spirit of human nature and the feminine.
“I am always looking for different ways to convey that. My most recent mural is this massive Black woman where when you approach the mural, you are kind of looking up to her and in the sense bowing down to her,” Wolfe-Goldsmith said.
In this current political and social climate, her inspiration comes from capturing the fight toward equity, the beauty of Black people, and how she can convey that momentum and inner strength.
“The word ‘pandemic’ makes me think of the centurylong systemic oppression and genocide of people in the United States and across the world — our systems cannot be healed without completely reinventing them,” said Wolfe-Goldsmith. Her main focus is the active creation of a new paradigm until doing so is no longer necessary. She has an upcoming project with Year Up that will center around Black liberation, and as creative director of the BAMP (Bay Area Mural Program), community-oriented projects will continue through the pandemic as the nonprofit is able.
You can support Wolfe-Goldsmith on her journey to building a creative collective by donating directly to her Venmo @Wolfe-Goldsmith, and you can support her community by donating directly to BAMP and the Anti Police-Terror Project.
It is particularly vital that these creative outlets remain accessible. These artists are living in their truth and using this time to propel visions of an intersectional and inclusive future. The emotional, social, creative, intellectual comfort that art brings to the Bay Area must be maintained.
