In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with Oakland based multidisciplinary artist and floral designer Tosha Stimage.
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 artist and floral designer Tasha Stimage, as they discuss her artistic journey, from her childhood experiences with nature to her current projects and inspirations. Emily highlights her creative process, experiences during the pandemic, and her upcoming installation at the Presidio Tunnel Tops.
About Artist Tosha Stimage:
Tosha Stimage is an Oakland-based multi-disciplinary artist who uses a variety of art mediums to examine how we create language. Her paintings, collages, installations, and floral sculptures “use experimentation to re-contextualize physical material and histories with fresh perspectives,” she shared.
As the founder of SAINTFLORA, a full-service floral design company specializing in “unconventional flower experiences”, Tosha is also a local entrepreneur and the third and final artist within the Presidio’s Public Art Mentorship Program. In July 2024 Tosha will create and install a large-scale art installation to transform the space between the Presidio Transit Center and the enclosed Picnic Pavilion at Presidio Tunnel Tops.
“Flowers put us back in the ‘circle’ and connect us to labor, land, and each other,” Tosha shared. “I’m incredibly excited to explore the flora of the Presidio and use it to spark curiosity and fresh perspectives. Nature provides an accessible and inclusive entry way for dialogue around complex social and environmental topics.”
Visit Tosha's Website: ToshaStimage.com
Support Tosha's Floral Shop: SaintFlora.com
Follow Tosha on Instagram: @SaintFloraCo
Learn More about her upcoming installation at The Presidio Tunnel Tops by CLICKING HERE.
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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
2024-0521 - AIA - EP026 - Tosha Stimage-1
Artist Tosha Stimage: [00:00:00] I was really trying to keep myself from going stir crazy because I had no money. I had no job. There was no prospect of getting money or a job because no one was hiring. Nothing was open. And I was really trying to re imagine what it meant to be a creative and this idea that anything can be art really with intention.
Host Emily Wilson: That's artist Tasha Stimage on what she did during shelter in place.
Welcome to Art is Awesome. I'm your host, Emily Wilson. I'm a writer in San Francisco, often covering the arts, and I've been meeting such great people that I created this bi weekly podcast to highlight their work.
Art is Awesome is now carried on KSFP LP 102. 5 FM, San Francisco on Fridays at 9am and 7pm. You can [00:01:00] listen live or stream it there.
Tasha Stimage is an artist and floral designer who lives in Oakland. She grew up in Mississippi and went to the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio. After graduating, she lived in rural Colorado, working with an organization doing art therapy with children. Then she went to grad school at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Tasha has been selected to be the third artist with the Ancestral Futures Program at the Presidio Tunnel Tops. Her installation, Superblooms, will be up in June, with an official opening in July. Tasha has won the prestigious Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award at SoMArts, and her work has been shown at numerous art institutions in the Bay Area and Columbus, Ohio.
I met Tasha at the Art Center at the Presidio, and she told me about drawing a mural on her wall with her sister as [00:02:00] a kid, how nature inspires her, and about making art out of her clothes and plants when she moved back to the Bay Area right before lockdown. She said her whole life, she's had a close relationship with plants.
Artist Tosha Stimage: I grew up in Mississippi, in Utica, Mississippi, which is not really on the map. It's just kind of in the middle of nowhere. So it was very communal, and I don't want to use the word neighborhood because that, that seems a little bit different than how the houses are set up where I used to live. But everyone had plots and they were all kind of around this larger plot of land that people kind of shared the work.
There's a history of enslavement in that area. And so a lot of the people that live there were related to each other or became family to each other and shared resources just from the collective culture of farming, everyone farmed and grew their own food. So I remember growing up and we grew black eyed peas, corn, tomatoes, okra, all kinds of greens.
And then harvest time too, we all sat [00:03:00] around. I remember being a kid sitting around like shucking corn and bagging up gallon bags of black-eyed peas to freeze so that food would like hold over.
Host Emily Wilson: Tosha was thrilled with the opportunity to work at the Presidio.
Artist Tosha Stimage: I was really interested in learning about more of the native plants of the Bay Area because I'm not a native to the Bay Area.
And in my practice as a florist, I really, really am trying to reverse engineer how I engage with my own practice of, you know, sourcing plants, using them single use, which is, it's a harm to the environment. We're not like thinking about how those things are impacting everything and not just us as individuals.
I think this was an opportunity for me to learn and expand on that desire to really start working more with native things, sourcing locally from local farmers, and then learning from the ecologists on site, botanists on site. I mean, it just felt like the perfect opportunity to have all the resources in one location and then have access to it.
Host Emily Wilson: She's the third artist working with the Ancestral Futurism Project at the Presidio Tunnel Tops. [00:04:00]
Artist Tosha Stimage: The premise is that we're looking at what was this land and this space before colonizing forces, powers, whether that be military or otherwise, what was the space like, and who were the people engaging and caring for the land, and how do we get back to those aboriginal roots of how we care and engage with environmental space.
Host Emily Wilson: The installation Tosha created, SuperBlooms, will be at the Tunnel Tops in San Francisco's Presidio in June.
Artist Tosha Stimage: I started with drawings, and then the drawings, I digitized them. And then all that stuff is just kind of based on me roaming around the park, learning about where these plants come from, like what they do, uh, which ones are.
The ones that stood out to me were the ones that I see. In our everyday life, but I didn't have as much knowledge about their history as I do now. And they kind of blew me away.
Host Emily Wilson: After teaching art on the East Coast, Tasha moved back to California. She went to L. A., but she couldn't find a job. So she returned to the Bay Area in [00:05:00] March 2020.
Artist Tosha Stimage: I moved back up to the Bay, found a place, signed the lease, and literally, and when I say literally, like the next day, shelter in place was like declared. And I was like, you've got to be kidding me. And I didn't have a plan. I had no job. I had no savings. The only thing that I had access to was UC Berkeley.
I was literally a block from the entrance of campus. And at that point in time in the pandemic, there were no staff. I'm assuming that they kind of minimize things to base operations. So anyone who wasn't like considered super integral to what they needed to do was kind of let go or they didn't need their services.
So it was all these plants growing. And UC Berkeley was like, overgrown, like unkept landscaping. And I was like, this looks like a resource. So I took my snips, I had an Ikea bag and I would go and snip things and then bring them back to my apartment. And I came up on the mega bus. So the only thing that I had was a suitcase, which maybe a week's worth of clothes and a couple of random things.
And so I was making sculptures out of my clothes and shoes. And then I would. add plants to it. So I was really a [00:06:00] trying to keep myself from going stir crazy because I had no money. I had no job. There was no prospect of getting money or job because no one was hiring. Nothing was open. And I was really trying to reimagine what it meant to be a creative and this idea that anything can be art really with intention.
Host Emily Wilson: Using what she had on hand to make art led her to floristry.
Artist Tosha Stimage: That time in that space alone without the resources that I thought I needed was a rebirth period, I would say. It made me as a person who's always been really open to a bevy of materials and mixing things together. It made me reimagine and have a new relationship to what the idea of resilience and resourcefulness and literally like you have the magic and it's what you do with it.
It's not about like you need a million dollars to do something or you need this idea. Situation. You just need to be able to have the ability to see something differently and then make it happen.
Host Emily Wilson: Ever since she was little, Tasha has loved making art.
Artist Tosha Stimage: I remember the first time me and my sister collectively [00:07:00] created a mural on our bedroom walls with crayon, and I remember when my mom walked into our room and saw it. And that was the last time we ever drew on walls with crayon I'll just say that, but even from maybe five or six, I was always inclined to like creatively express myself. And growing up, I always won art competitions in school. I was a person who didn't necessarily need to be around a lot of people.
I spent a lot of time in the woods growing up. I spent a lot of time observing and drawing and collecting. I think that I've always been a super curious person and art has always been kind of a way for me to explore the things that I'm taking in visually or audibly or sensory and translate them into something that helps me connect to other people in the world.
I was just really good at art. My friends would pay me to do things like draw them portraits or draw their name in bubble letters and put some sparkles, all the cheesy stuff you do as a young person in school. But I was making money and I felt pretty cool. And I started winning some art competitions and they, you know, send a little hundred dollar check.
And I was like, man, I got a hundred dollars. I won this art thing. You know?
Host Emily Wilson: [00:08:00] Tosha started out studying design at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio. She didn't like it.
Artist Tosha Stimage: I hated being told what to do, making something for some corporation or some company. I wanted to be a graphic designer. I kind of put in some coursework for that.
And I don't know, just the very rigidness of At least at that time and how my brain understood it, it felt too rigid for who I was as a person. I also was like double majoring as fashion designer and I ended up switching. I dropped one of the majors and then I switched to fine art in the middle of my time in undergrad.
Just because like fashion too kind of just, I don't know, it just started to meld worlds that I wasn't quite like in line with. Personally, like the, the kind of ego that can come with, with those fields was something that I was like, super kind of like, no, this is not really my thing. But in fine art, I was able to kind of really mix together all of these different passions and desires.
I could design things. I could use textiles. It was a space where there wasn't as many restricting rules I felt. And it allowed me to really [00:09:00] like explore different mediums to find things that I really loved expressing with and creating with.
Host Emily Wilson: This is three questions. The part of the show where I ask the artists the same three questions to learn more about them. The questions are, when did you know you were an artist? What's some work that's had an impact on you? And what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?
Artist Tosha Stimage: When did I know I was an artist? I don't know if there's a point. I honestly feel like I've always known. And if I had to peg, Some period of time, I'd probably say when I was around like six.
Some of the artworks that had a really big impact on me, I was trying to think of as a [00:10:00] kid, if there were things, but honestly, I can't remember ever really having big art experiences until I was in college. And that was when, you know, my experience of art was really like blown open. I think the very first.
piece of work that I saw that was moving to me in an art gallery was when I was in undergrad, and I went over. So the museum is on the same property as the art college. It's the Columbus Museum of Art, and they own in their collection, a huge painting by Artemisia Gentileschi. I don't want to misquote the title of the one that I saw. I'm almost positive it's Judith beheading Holofernes. And if it's not that one, it's her beheading someone. And you know, the history is that she's like a female painter. And we all know the history of like women in art, especially back in the old times, like they were invisible and made invisible or their careers are overshadowed or co opted by men who weren't as talented.
And so they just kind of went unknown unheard of and so when I read about [00:11:00] her and her story and saw how like badass of a painter She was I was like, holy and then in the painting she's cutting a dude's head off. I'm like, yes This is amazing So one of her works I saw that was really in the scale of the painting I mean the painting must have been like i'm not really good with like sizes, but It consumed your body.
Like you had to stand back to take it in. It was so large. And I was like, man, this is really someone who refused to be like silenced or put into this category. It was just a chick painting. It was like, no, this is my painting. You're going to step back and like, take this shit in, you know? So I really loved her work when I was in undergrad.
And then there was a Kehinde Wiley piece that the museum acquired. And I was blown away truly because I had never seen black people, you know, depicted in that way with such excellence. And when I say excellence, I just like, in the specific discipline of like trying to create photorealistic portraiture, because there's so many styles of painting.
So I don't want to say like excellent as, you know, some benchmark for how all painting should be. It's just a different kind of painting, but I [00:12:00] really, and because I was into flowers and botanical things, of course, you know, Kehinde Wiley was just like, Oh my goodness.
I think the most inspiring place in the Bay Area for me as a creative, I guess it would depend on what it's inspiring me to do. And I guess everything inspires me to do everything. So maybe I just answer my own question. I love being in nature. I love Joaquin Miller park. Love it. Sometimes it's nice to drive up and just go be in nature.
I try to go in the middle of the week when there's not a lot of people, cause then you can really feel the silence. It's a silence that I can't really describe, but I think my childhood self is familiar with that kind of quiet where. All you hear, it's like you're in a vacuum of nature and you can hear every single bug fly by, you can hear every bird, you know, in these different little recesses of, there's something really magical about that.
Being able to be, there being so much stillness that you can feel yourself in the middle of it. It's really grounding for [00:13:00] me. And I think for me personally, I don't always need something that's like overtly creative to be inspired to be creative. I think that nature is, The OG creator, just looking at plants and animals and like all the different things that we don't even know yet, like on our own planet.
And so I think definitely nature probably trumps everything as the most creative space for me personally.
Host Emily Wilson: Thank you for listening to art is awesome. And thanks to our guests. Artist and floral designer, Tosha Stimage. Her installation Super Blooms for the Ancestral Futurism Project will be up in June at the Presidio with an official opening in July. Please follow the show and join us next time when our guest will be Tucker Nichols, one of eight Bay Area artists in the documentary, Tell Them We Were Here.
He recently released a book, Flowers for Things I Don't Know How to Say.[00:14:00]
Art is Awesome is a bi weekly podcast coming out every other Tuesday. It's created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Gotu of Gotu Productions. It's carried on KSFP LP 102. 5 FM, San Francisco on Fridays at 9 a. m. and 7 p. m. Our theme music is provided by Kevin MacLeod with Incompetech Music.
Be sure and follow us on Instagram at artisawesomepodcast or visit our website. Till next time.