Exhibition Dates

December 6, 2024 – January 17, 2024

Opening Reception & Community Gathering

Friday, December 6, 2024

5 – 8 PM @ ARTogether, Oakland

As we witness the cycles of dehumanization and criminalization of our community continue here and abroad, our dedication to each other and our resilience only strengthens. Join us at ARTogether, where Bay Area immigrant, refugee, and diasporic artists can build collective power, care for their creativity and dreams, and create sanctuary for all.

Exhibiting Artists

Jun Yang (b. Seoul, South Korea) is a self-taught artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, murals, and textile sculptures. Their work draws on personal experiences of trauma, migration, grief, and the Queer immigrant experience, exploring themes of identity, belonging, and healing. Having lived in Ireland, Belgium, and France before settling in San Francisco, Jun’s art reflects both the dislocation and resilience of their journey. Jun’s work engages with activism, advocating for LGBTQ+ and immigrant rights, while celebrating the solidarity they have found in San Francisco.

The Tekah Tekah Project led by Afghan American artist Gazelle Samizay and Iranian artist Katayoun Bahrami was a community textile art project designed to connect Afghan and Mensa artists with women from the Afghan refugee community to explore creative art forms such as embroidery, textile painting, cyanotypes, quilt-making, and visual storytelling.

Anita Sulimanovic is a San Francisco Bay Area based visual artist and educator working in a broad range of art materials and processes. From drawing, photography and printmaking, to performance, video and sound pieces, but most often sculpture and site-specific art. Born in Croatia, she studied painting at the School of Applied Art, completed her BFA studies in sculpture at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts, and graduated with an MFA in Sculpture at the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. Upon immigrating to the US in 2008 she founded Studio 1.6 Art School where she teaches studio art disciplines. She has also taught visual arts at Oakland School for the Arts and at Kala Art Institute.

An engineer turned artist, Ujjayini Sikha is an Indian immigrant, who now calls the Bay area home. After working in the tech industry Ujjayini switched careers towards art and attended the San Francisco Art Institute for her MFA studies. Reflecting the complexity of her own identity, her art traverses geographies and cultures, that prima facie seem removed and divergent, but they all aim to chart and interpret our shared human experience. With a profound reverence for the feminine essence—its form, presence, and consciousness—her creations unravel the untold narratives of women, highlighting their strength amidst life’s trials and victories.

Jessica Nguyen is a Bay Area grown performing and visual artist exploring themes of the estrangement of humanity. Drawing on her multidisciplinary background in the arts, sciences, and education, she is currently building shadow puppet shows examining our sentimental relationships to environmental catastrophe.

Sabina Shanti Kariat and the Shadow Movements youth cohort will be exhibiting their animated film “The Alchemy of Home.” Lead Artist Sabina Shanti Kariat (she/they) is an Indian-American community worker, animator, artist, and filmmaker based in San Francisco. She creates animations for documentary films about diaspora narratives and fights for liberation and human rights. Sabina has been a teaching artist throughout San Francisco, and has led co-creation workshops in the Bay, in rural Jharkhand India, and in Istanbul and Reyhanli, Turkey where she completed her Fulbright Research Fellowship about representing diasporic identities through traditional puppetry.

Samira Akbari Hozmahi  is a San Francisco-based artist with an MFA from the Academy of Art University. Working from her studio in the city, she translates years of feeling and observation into deeply personal pieces. Her art invites a quiet, intimate connection, offering viewers a glimpse into the layers of human experience.

Taro Hattori is an interdisciplinary artist who has shown his installations and socially engaged projects nationally and internationally. His recent work often creates relationships between physical sculpture and space with people with a specific socio-political background through their performances, conversations and singing. His exhibited project “Pedaling Point” is the culmination of collaborations and conversations with immigrant and refugee artists through ARTogether. He is currently teaching at CCA as the chair of Sculpture and Individualized Programs. 

Bushra Gill is interested in finding order within the chaos of everyday life through art. She was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and emigrated to Houston, Texas, with her family as a small child. Drawn to art from a young age, she graduated from Pratt Institute in 1994, with a BFA in sculpture. She spent many years of working as a museum educator at various galleries and museums including The Museum of Modern Art, The Drawing Center and The Rotunda Gallery, while also working as a studio assistant to various artists including Maya Lin, Ursula von Rydingsvard and Maria Elena Gonzalez, as well as a career as a clothing designer and boutique owner in New York. In 2009, she moved to northern California with her family and returned to making art. In recent years, Gill has participated in many exhibitions in galleries across the United States.

Kimberley Acebo Arteche is an educator, cultural worker, and interdisciplinary artist. She is the co-founder of Balay Kreative, a future Filipinx American Cultural Center providing artist sustainability and professional development programs in SOMA Pilipinas, and has served on Southern Exposure’s Curatorial Council, SOMA Pilipinas’ Arts & Culture Committee, and was the Visual Arts curator for UNDISCOVERED SF. She is Community Arts Panelist for the Zellerbach Family Foundation, is a Healing Justice Practitioner with the Anti-Police Terror Project, and is a 2023 Leaderspring LeadStrong fellow. Arteche is committed to collaboratively creating decolonial practices within arts institutions, while creating visibility and providing resources for emerging Asian Pacific American and BIPOC Artists.

Somaieh Amini is a painter and illustrator based in San Jose, CA. She was born in 1981 in Isfahan, Iran. She received a B.A. in painting at the University of Al-Zahra in Tehran. Between 2001 and 2007, Somaieh worked as a Concept, Background, and Layout Artist with several animation companies, as well as a Matte Painter for several television series and films. In 2009, Somaieh left Iran to pursue an M.A. in painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma in Rome, Italy. In 2012 she emigrated from Italy to the USA. These relocations have had an emotional impact on her personal and social life, taking her three years to restart her artistic career again. In 2015, she decided that painting and illustration are what she wanted to do for the rest of her life.

Eva Agus is a visual and textile artist in Oakland, California who grew up in the Chinese diaspora of Jakarta, Indonesia. Eva is a Berkeley PhD engineer who is disabled due to terminal cancer and embarked on her art practice to explore her heritage and end of life. Eva’s work blends her technical background with a love for folkloric textiles and Asian art traditions. Her works have been included as public art and exhibits in Oakland, San Jose, Seattle and others.