I’ll start off by saying, I think everyone’s an artist. And what I appreciate about art is that people just really pursue what they care about.

My studio is in Hunters Point in San Francisco.

I make paintings, sculptures, installation.

Welcome to my studio. I wish I could say I was organized, but I’m not. Things are just everywhere. Kind of depends on what I’m working on. Here’s my deer, as of now unnamed. I’ve had this rock for eight years. I love it. It rReminded me of Cast Away. And I was like, Oh, now I have my own, like, what’s his name? Like, Wilson?

Yeah. So Wilson lives there. I just have a very intuitive painting process, so I’ll just stare at it. Find little areas that I think need something, depending on what kind of series of painting I’m doing, and then just start to, like, plug in.

So this piece is a triptych that depicts Buffalo Bayou. I was pulling from these NASA maps that showed air quality in Houston. The blue was, kind of, the clearest air. There’s areas that get, like, red and purple that were, like, the worst air quality. In using those air quality maps, was able to kind of talk about, in my head, redlining and ways in which pollution was enforced on the landscape and communities around there.

I made art for a long time before I ever thought it was going to be a career. I didn’t grow up around museums and fine art. My dad is from Libya and my mom is a Yurok/Karuk Tribal member. I’m a Yurok Tribal member as well. I just grew up around, watching people have this, like, practice of their own. There was a lot of craft. 

I came to art in just being surrounded by it through family and culture, and then grew up skateboarding. My introduction to art was, kind of, just, like, drawing on things. And then that transitioned into graffiti. And then, from there, I transitioned into going to art school.

When I made the piece that’s in the collection here, we were in lockdown at the time. There was that period during lockdown where there was the big orange sky, and I think that was, like, a climate wake-up call for a lot of people. My family and my mom do cultural fire stuff. The work they’re doing overlaps with what everyone is experiencing.

The palette from the fire maps at the time is what inspired the palette for the painting. I remember going on these trail walks and, like, pulling some weeds. And then directly placing these things onto the canvas and having them make the mark. And the weeds being attached to, like, what was happening with the fires, whether that be overgrowth or invasive species.

Most Indigenous communities globally, there’s a deep connection to the land. And just thinking about the land, you can talk about everything, like what’s been imposed on it, what’s been imposed on people. And that just felt like such an easy way to talk about everything. And then also something I care about.

I’ve only really ever lived in the Bay Area. I appreciate the community. I appreciate the diversity. There’s a history of social activism and engagement that I feel like spills into a lot of the way people make art. My hopes for the Bay Area art community are the same hopes that I have for the Bay Area, that it’s like, feels more equitable and livable for everyone.

I think people being able to have time and not work, like, multiple jobs to survive, inevitably leads to people having the ability to make art and be present in different ways.

I’m grateful to be able to make full time and be able to, like, structure my life around my family and making things. I don’t know that anything is forever, but I’m grateful for it now.