In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with Oakland based charcoal artist Esteban Samayoa.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Today, Emily chats with Esteban Samayoa, an Oakland based charcoal artist.
About Artist Esteban Samayoa:
Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa grew up in Sacramento and started drawing when he was three years old. His only formal art class was at Sacramento City College, where a teacher showed him how to use charcoal, which became his favorite medium.
A few years ago, to push himself, Esteban moved to Oakland. One gallery offered him a show, then another, and now he has a solo show at Pt 2 gallery, Ain’t No Dogs in Heaven.
Visit Esteban's Work and Pt.2 Gallery by CLICKING HERE.
Follow Esteban on Instagram: @wulffvnky
Follow Pt.2 Gallery on Instagram: @pt.2gallery
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
2023-08-29 - AIA - EP008 - Esteban Samayoa
[00:00:00] Artist Esteban Samayoa: That's exactly what I'm going for, that happiness for them to be like, wow, I'm in a gallery. Multiple people are going to see this and that's my face and I look beautiful.
[00:00:17] Host Emily Wilson: That's Esteban Samayoa on wanting people in his community to see themselves on the walls of a gallery.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or artworker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host, Emily Wilson. As a writer in San Francisco covering the arts, I see so many hardworking artists doing interesting work here in the Bay Area, and I wanted people to know about them.
So I came up with Art is Awesome.
Esteban Rahim Abdul Rahim Samayoa grew up in Sacramento [00:01:00] and started drawing when he was three years old. His only formal art class was at Sacramento City College, where a teacher showed him how to use charcoal, which became his favorite medium. A few years ago, to push himself, Esteban moved to Oakland.
One gallery offered him a show, then another, and now he has a solo show at Pt 2 Gallery. Ain't no dogs in heaven. He treated it like a retrospective, and each of the three rooms has a different version of him and his art. The first has his black and white charcoal drawings, many featuring dogs. In the second room, Esteban delved into his Mexican and Guatemalan heritage and worked in color.
The last section has rugs on the floor and plaster casts of praying hands, exploring his conversion to Islam. Esteban walked me through the rooms. In the first one, he says the [00:02:00] art is by Pops, his nickname growing up.
[00:02:05] Artist Esteban Samayoa: So all of this work is pretty much what I'm known for, which is charcoal, black and white work. And it's, it's just about, you know, like a coming of age, things that young men go through in our communities, but also just things I've lived through. Things that my friends have lived through, different stories.
A lot of people relate to that I love to bring in a gallery space, you know, cause I always tell people that the art world and, and being in gallery spaces is really hard for,people of color to, to get in, you know, or to make this a career, you know, it seems like unreachable. So I always love to portray like people in my community and on the walls of my shows because it kind of just gives them that clarity that yeah this is obtainable for us
[00:02:59] Host Emily Wilson: Esteban points [00:03:00] out one of the large pieces called All in the Family. It contains dogs, music references, and family and friends
[00:03:07] Artist Esteban Samayoa: The way. I like to paint people is I love to accentuate their their glow or their jewelry.
This piece is very dreamlike and what we wish for just has that sense of maybe what has already happened or just a distant memory or a dream. So you'll see that everyone has like jewelry and they're very shiny and I love to just make them look really beautiful.
[00:03:34] Host Emily Wilson: Dogs are a big part of Esteban’s art.
[00:03:37] Artist Esteban Samayoa: I grew up with Rottweilers and a doberman, and they were rescued, so they were really sweet.
But you know people portray them as like a very scary breed, but I don't think that's necessarily true. I just think it's they're just misunderstood or that's what society makes them out to be and that kind of just relates [00:04:00] to even myself like for Dobermans, for instance, like they'll clip their ears and you know, and they're So they have pointy ears and they're upright and they look scary, but it's just like society does that to them.
People do that. And I think I'm viewed the same way. You know, people see me, it's like, oh, you have tattoos and all this kind of stuff. I look scary, but I'm really nice.
[00:04:21] Host Emily Wilson: In the next room in the show, the paintings switch to color. There's a red and yellow painting of tortillas on a table and one of a tree with a green background, along with a real clothesline set up with clothes hanging on it and a sculpture of a dog holding up a table.
[00:04:38] Artist Esteban Samayoa: This one is by Esteban, which is my birth name. And here I dive into my Mexican and Guatemalan culture. I think growing up, I never really felt Mexican or Guatemalan enough. I think because I've, because of like family traumas or whatever, uh, my [00:05:00] father was always in and out and me and my mother don't have the strongest relationship.
So I think just because of things that go on within my family. I just never was taught like correctly about, uh, what it means to be Mexican and Guatemalan. I mean, I've lived the life. My grandma, we have a whole bunch of chickens. We're making chicken soup. I'm out on the ranch riding horses with my pops. I'm out there landscaping with them, eating all the Mexican food, traditional dishes, everything, you know? So, but the connection for me wasn't there because I don't know. I feel like I raised myself. I was out in the neighborhood with all my friends and stuff. So I was kind of raised by the community around me.
So everything I've learned and everything I got, I got from myself. So this room was really important for me because now I'm seeing my culture with newfound beauty and on my own terms. [00:05:58]
Host Emily Wilson: Esteban says it was challenging for him [00:06:00] to switch to a more abstract style.
[00:06:02] Artist Esteban Samayoa: This was honestly the toughest room for me because I wanted to get away from what I was doing, which is focusing on a strong figure.I wanted to focus more so on color and how it interacts with textures.
[00:06:20] Host Emily Wilson: To make the art in this room, Estevan learned about his heritage.
[00:06:24] Artist Esteban Samayoa: I actually went back to Sacramento and talked with my family, my grandmother, and asked about her life more as a kid. Asked about her parents and where they come from.
And, you know, just listen to more stories. I think growing up, we didn't really talk too much about where we come from or, you know, I didn't really know too much about their life or even how my grandparents met or just what life was like for them growing up. So I really got a lot of insight. We're looking at a lot of family photos, things I've never really seen before and that really inspired me.
[00:06:58] Host Emily Wilson: He also read [00:07:00] autobiographies of Mexican artists like Diego Rivera. And he read about a Guatemalan artist, Carlos Lorca, who moved to Sacramento. Esteban worked on the show for a year, scrapping about a dozen pieces that didn't meet his standards. The last color painting he did is La Mesa.
[00:07:19] Artist Esteban Samayoa: Growing up, my grandmother would wake up really early, probably like 530, make coffee and breakfast for my grandfather. And when we would get up for school, we'd have breakfast ready. So yeah, this is just a painting of some tortillas being rolled out. My grandmother did a lot of cooking all from scratch and of course we had dogs and they would always be peeking over the table and my family always fed our dogs human food. So they All of our dogs are fat. They're just so spoiled but in the corner you see two dogs just really looking at the food waiting for their treat as well But this kind of set the tone for what I'll be doing in the future.I [00:08:00] think it's a perfect mix of What I'll be doing with color, but also incorporating a lot of the charcoal work that I'm really familiar with.
[00:08:10] Host Emily Wilson: A red wall and a white curtain hanging in the doorway make a shift to the last section.
[00:08:17] Artist Esteban Samayoa: This room is really dim, uh, really, you know, dark and intimate. This is the room that is by Rahim, which is, uh, the name I currently go by now.
And my conversion to Islam, I converted about a year ago now. And this is, I like that this is the smallest room because this is still so new to me, you know. So, this is kind of like what's to come. And just where am I currently? This is something new for me. This type of sculpture and installation is, uh, very new.
These pieces resemble praying in Islam and it's all hand gestures that you make while [00:09:00] you pray.
[00:09:01] Host Emily Wilson: Esteban thinks about the sensory experience of visitors as well.
[00:09:05] Artist Esteban Samayoa: In the middle room with Esteban, I mop the floors with Fabuloso, which is just a Mexican household product. And you know, um, you wake up, your granny's cleaning already in the morning.
It smells like Fabuloso all in the house. And then in this room, I lit a lot of incense, lit some sage. So it has a very musk, uh, smell to the room. And the dark ambiance, so I think that kind of helps put you in these environments.
[00:09:33] Host Emily Wilson: Literally highlighting the beauty of his friends is what Esteban wants to do in his art.
[00:09:39] Artist Esteban Samayoa: It just comes from me wanting to make these people as godly or as beautiful as possible. I want them to see themselves on these walls and be like, wow, I'm really glowing. Like, uh, so these two figures in the top left corner and all the family are all in the family piece. The women on the right, [00:10:00] she's my best friend, Michaela from high school, and that's her partner, Jerrica.
And, um, you know, they came to the opening and they were, you know, the look on their face was just so proud, so happy that they were in this show and just how, like, just bright and luscious they look, you know, so them standing next to their face and them just smiling in the photo is just. I don't know.
That, that's exactly what I'm going for. That happiness for them to be like, wow, I'm in a gallery. Multiple people are going to see this and that's my face when I look beautiful.
[00:10:35] Host Emily Wilson: Esteban always had faith that he would be an artist. Beyond the class in Sacramento, where he learned how to do charcoal, he didn't go to art school.
He prefers to learn from his friends. He's had two solo shows previous to this one, after moving to Oakland. For both, the galleries contacted him.
[00:10:55] Artist Esteban Samayoa: My charcoal drawings. I'll post little things here and there but uh, yeah, good [00:11:00] mother actually hit me up and they were like Hey, do you want to do a show? And I was like, yeah.
Yeah. Hell yeah, and they're like, okay It'd be in two weeks like dang. I'm not ready for that. You know, two weeks. That's crazy but i'm not gonna say no because That's the opportunity that I've always that's what I've been waiting for, you know, so there's no way I would turn that down So I said, yeah with not much work on my hands and for two weeks all day and night I made a whole body of work and we stretched it I didn't even really know how to stretch my work because it was so large and it was so funny looking back at it now Because they were stretched on plywood. They were all cut janky and bowing off the walls Yeah, it was crazy. But I look back at it and it was It's beautiful still, you know, so much heart and soul and that body of work and that really set the tone for where I'm at.
[00:11:57] Host Emily Wilson: This is the part of the show, Three Questions, [00:12:00] where I ask the artists the same three questions to learn a little bit more about them. When did you know you were an artist? What's some work that made a big impact on you? And what is the most inspiring place creatively? In the Bay Area in Esteban's answers, you can hear his faith in himself and his love of his friends.
He mentions a couple of artists who also work at Pt 2 Muzae Sesay, who currently has work ati San Francisco's de Young Museum, and Lenworth Macintosh, who also goes by Junebug.
[00:12:39] Artist Esteban Samayoa: I knew I was an artist. Yeah, just at a very, very young age. I was always staying up super late as a kid, drawing, making comic books and building stories like that. Even going through school, just in the back of the class, inside, drawing with my head down. [00:13:00] Everyone else knew I was an artist. And I always felt something special was going to come.
It's just a matter of like, me taking that leap. And, um, investing in myself,
I would have to say it's a lot of my friends work, I think that's the work that is really impactful on me because I get to talk to them. You don't get to talk to these famous artists. I really get to have these intimate conversations with my friends who I admire. And we just support each other so much.
The most creatively inspiring place for me in the Bay Area would probably have to be Pt 2. I'm gonna have to rep that because, um, I see so much art every day and this is... [00:14:00] It's a spot that is really about local artists in the community and how strongly we feel and how strongly we care about each other really evolves my practice.
I'm in proximity with like Musae, you know, who's a really established artist. I'm able just to go into his studio and just talk or see what he's working on and see his practice or Lenworth McIntosh, who I admire very deeply as well. Like I get to see how. He works and see up close and personal and handle his work as well.
So just different things like that really inspired me to be the best I can.
[00:14:47] Host Emily Wilson: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of art is awesome. And thanks to our guest Esteban Rahim Abdul Rahim Samayoa. You can get more information [00:15:00] and link to his work in our show notes. His solo show, Ain't No Dogs in Heaven, is at Pt 2 Gallery in Oakland through September 9th. It really helps if you subscribe and rate us wherever you get your podcasts.
Our next episode will feature Juana Alicia, a leading figure in the California mural movement. A show of her work, Me Llaman Calle, the monumental art of Juana Alicia, is at the San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery on Van Ness.
Art is Awesome is a bi weekly podcast dropping every other Tuesday. It was created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Gotu of Gotu Productions. Our theme music is provided by Kevin MacLeod [00:16:00] with Incompetech Music. Be sure to follow us on social media or visit our website.
Till next time.