Photography courtesy of Rich Lomibao

About the Exhibition

SOMArts is proud to partner with the San Francisco Foundation to present the 2022 Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Awards Exhibition, a focused look at the future of the Bay Area visual arts, on view September 10–October 7, 2022. Made possible by the San Francisco Foundation and its donors, we’re excited to feature promising visual artists working across disciplines and identifying young artists from Master of Fine Arts programs throughout the Bay Area whose work intersects with emerging trends.

The Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award is given to an MFA student of unusual caliber with great artistic promise. Edwin Anthony and Adalaine Boudreaux Cadogan both experienced financial challenges as art students and understood the great difference scholarships can make in the early phase of an artist’s career. The winners of the Murphy and Cadogan scholarships each receive support for their MFA studies. All the students benefit from participation in a professionally curated exhibition at SOMArts Cultural Center and mentorship from curator Kevin B. Chen.

Murphy Award

Gericault De La Rose, University of California Berkeley

Cadogan Award

Irma Yuliana Barbosa, University of California Berkeley

Carolina Cuevas, California College of the Arts

Dance Doyle, California College of the Arts

Eniola Fakile, University of California Berkeley

Rachell Hester, San Jose State University

Thad Higa, Mills College

Tina Kashiwagi, Stanford University

Charles H. Lee,III, California College of the Arts

Philippa Renshaw, San Francisco State University

Tiare Ribeaux, University of California Berkeley

Maryam Safanasab, San Francisco State University

Jake Shapiro, San Francisco State University

Meet the Artists

Carolina Cuevas

Charles Lee

Dance Doyle

Eniola Fakile

Gericault De La Rose

Irma Barbosa

Jake Shapiro

Marayam Safanasab

Philippa Renshaw

Rachell Hester

Thad Higa

Tiare Ribeaux

Tina Kashiwagi

Carolina Cuevas

Carolina Cuevas is currently pursuing her Master in Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary art San Francisco, San Jose’s Quilts and Textile Museum, International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemét, Hungary, and at the Kansas City Artist Coalition. She is the recipient of several awards including the Cultura Power Fellowship, the Knight Foundation, McKeown Grant, Rita and Irwin Scholarship Award, and the Ox-Bow Workshop Recipient. She has her work in the San Jose’s Quilts and Textiles permanent collection.

To learn more about their work, please follow on instagram: @carolinac16

Charles Lee

Charles Lee (b. 1983, Honolulu) is a visual artist, curator, arts educator and MFA Candidate at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Lee’s work subverts the narrative that Black culture is a monolith by creating authentic narratives that address issues of reclamation, identity, family, class, authorship, othering; highlighting the existence of subcultures within the Black American diaspora. His work demystifies the act of being Black, showing the nuance of contemporary Black life. Lee’s most recent body of work, Afro-Americana, is a collaboration with his own familial archive. His Grandfather was a prolific amatuer photographer and during the pandemic, Lee inherited hundreds of photographs and negatives from both sides of his family. This work is focused on re-contextualizing archival photographs and creating new portraits of his family members, re-imagining the family photo-album. Lee has exhibited both nationally and internationally.  He was also selected to attend The Eddie Adams Workshop XXXIV and has had a photo essay published on Oxford University Press. Lee is entering his final year of his MFA and works as a freelance documentary photographer, visual artist and teaching assistant.

To learn more about their work, please follow on instagram: @ohhh_so_sirius

Dance Doyle 

Dance Doyle is an Oakland-based artist. Through the years, they became self-taught at tapestry by trial, error, and taking risks. In 2019, they finished a 9-month AIR at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY, then they finished a year-long Artist in residency at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan for 12 months. In 2020, Dance was an AIR at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE. Dance is Vice-President of Tapestry Weavers West and is a member of the Textile Arts Council at the De Young in San Francisco. Dance is currently an MFA Candidate at CCA, class of 2023.

To learn more about their work, please follow on instagram: @dance_doyle

Eniola Fakile

Eniola Fakile is a Bay Area artist. Fakile uses film photography, textiles, and sculptural techniques to create dynamic installations and photographs. Her work focuses on the elusive and multiple intersections where memory, emotion and identity meet. Fakile’s most recent work is an exploration of herself through dynamic portraits in a variety of mediums. She received her Bachelors Of Fine Arts in photography from Georgia State University. Fakile is currently an MFA candidate in Art Practices at The University of California at Berkeley, and was the 2021 Graduate Fellow for Honors Pedagogy.

To learn more about their work, please follow on instagram: @enomakesart

Gericault De La Rose

In 2017, Gericault De La Rose received her Bachelor’s in Fine Arts with an emphasis in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During her time in college, she had the opportunity to work as a Co-curator of Philippine Objects at the Field Museum where she organized a series of monthly events called Pamanang Pinoy. In 2018, she attended the ACRE residency in Steuben, Wisconsin having received the Brenda Green Gender Inclusivity Scholarship and was a HATCH artist resident for the Chicago Artist Coalition in 2020. She is currently an MFA candidate at UC Berkeley.

To learn more about their work, please follow on instagram: @im.ubae

Irma Yuliana Barbosa

Irma Yuliana Barbosa (Yuli) is a queer Latinx multimedia artist born in the San Fernando Valley. They are currently an MFA candidate at UC Berkeley. Yuli makes precarious installations that incorporate projections, photographs, sculpture, and performance. Through their practice they navigate liminal space in relation to identity making, border consciousness, and rasquachismo. Inspired by the malleability of transgenerational memory and its relationship to the creation of selfhood; they are committed to translating material memory through processes of preservation and transformation.
To learn more about their work, please follow on instagram: @irmayulianabarbosa

Jake Shapiro

Jake Shapiro was born and raised in Berkeley, CA. His mixed-media paintings depict fictional collaged worlds that question cultural and social norms that come from observation, research, and lots of daydreaming. He compiles sourced and personal images, collaging and redrawing them which becomes a template for the artwork, using various mediums to produce a spectrum of representation and abstraction to put the real and imaginary in conversation. Jake is currently a graduate student in the Art Practice Department at San Francisco State University and will receive his MFA in May 2024.

To learn more about their work, please follow on instagram: @jakeshpiro

Marayam Safanasab

Maryam Safanasab is a MFA student at San Francisco State University. Her art is rooted in her hybrid identity and diasporic experience and centers on how we define the ‘self’ and ‘other’ through cross-cultural encounters. Inspired by the concept of opacity, Safanasab conjures a space of hybrid geographies constituted by objects produced out of her diasporic cultural aesthetics exploring ways to represent her native country, Iran, from her vantage point in the U.S. She has exhibited at Root Division, 500 Capp Street, and Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco (ICASF).

To learn more about their work, please follow on instagram: @sanaz_safanassab

Philippa Renshaw

Philippa Renshaw is a British interdisciplinary Artist, Designer, Maker, based in San Francisco. She creates surface patterns by employing an array of techniques including printmaking, textiles, ceramics, drawing, painting, and digital art. In an ever-changing, complex, and interconnected world, where do we find contentment? Living in a neoliberal capitalist society, she mourns the loss of quality that comes with cost and process simplification, while simultaneously re-considering the relevance of handcrafts in a technological world. Choosing to focus on the mundane pleasures that can be observed amongst the chaos of daily life, Renshaw slows down and takes in her physical surroundings. She investigates surface pattern through material exploration with undervalued processes such as sewing. She works between what David Pye the furniture designer and author calls “the workmanship of risk and the workmanship of certainty”. Renshaw has an MA in Design Futures and a BA in Textile Design from Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK and is currently studying for an MFA at San Francisco State University, USA.

To learn more about their work, please follow on instagram: @philipparenshaw.studio

Rachell Hester

Rachell Hester received her BA in Visual and Public Art with an emphasis in large scale painting and mural from California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) in 2014. She is an artist, maker, and educator. Hester primarily paints but also works with darkroom photography, sculpture and printmaking. She has assisted in various art and engineering classes for a variety of ages from third graders to adults. Hester is attending the Master of Fine Arts Pictorial Program at San Jose State University and works as the Makerspace Coordinator for CSUMB’s Library Makerspace.
To learn more about their work, please follow on instagram: @tripodgeorge

Thad Higa

Thad Higa is an Okinawan-Korean American cultural worker, born 1989 on Ohlone Land, San Jose, California, and raised in Hawaiʻi. Thad received a BA in Creative Writing from Seattle University in 2011. His work has been exhibited in the Hawaiʻi State Art Museum, Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn, Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, Knust Kunz Gallery in Munich, and at the Hawaiʻi 2022 Triennial, among other venues. Thad is a book artist, writer, concrete poet, and graphic designer. He makes work around the process of identity-making, propaganda + advertisement, the role and mechanism of language in perceptions of reality, as well as the stifled condition of western thought processes + knowledge evaluation under capitalist and colonial structures. This reassessing of knowledge is a practice of using questions as processing tools and as end products, understanding that to our relationship to social bodies and to each individual is a relationship of change and unknowing.     “[…] everything is based on connections and nothing else.” –Eduardo Calderon, from Reading the Mesa

To learn more about their work, please follow on instagram: @QRWHZGUB

Tiare Ribeaux

Tiare Ribeaux is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Her work focuses on social and ecological imbalances, employing the atemporal landscapes of dreams to explore the liminal dimensions of our reality and the cyclical nature of the elements as positioned within the Hawaiian cosmology/worldview. She uses technological tools as a means to trace heritage, bridge and magnify the sacred, and to make the liminal visible. Born and raised on O’ahu, and now living in the Hawaiian diaspora, her recent work has been directed towards a return home and a reclamation of her heritage as Kanaka Maoli.

To learn more about their work, please follow on instagram: @tiareribeaux

Tina Kashiwagi

Tina Kashiwagi is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in the Bay Area. Using experimental media, installation and performance, their work explores the shifting of memory and its ability to play with perception and transcend space and time. They confront traumas of the past to open up a dialogue that has been buried underneath. They do this in attempts to heal themselves as well as members of their family who have all been affected by ancestral trauma. Tina received their BFA in Art Education from San Francisco State University in 2016 and is a member of Oakland based art collective Macro Waves. Tina is currently pursuing their MFA in Studio Art at Stanford University.y.

To learn more about their work, please follow on instagram: @ti_michiko