Emi Ramirez is a visual artist who goes by the alias H.R. Emi. Specializing in painting and drawing, she creates art with the intention of capturing a disruption of emotion through everyday moments. H.R. Emi’s work blends realism, iconography, and language to create her artistic vision, often representing snapshots of familiar liminal spaces that tell a portion of an interactive narrative; this artistic narrative is also influenced by the duality of her Mexican and American background. Through art, Emi has learned how to visualize the way she navigates the world, how she records her time here, and how she reflects on her own particular lens of life.

Emi (b. 2000) is based in Yakima Valley and is a First-Generation Mexican-American with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Central Washington University. Currently, Emi has been interested in how her work reflects her personal intergenerational trauma due to the legacies of colonialism, systematic racism, and immigrant-related stressors. As the firstborn child of Mexican immigrants, Emi was the first to navigate many aspects of American society – creating experiences that were unexplainable to her due to lack of discussion and representation. Identifying and understanding these cycles has been Emi’s current objective with her body of work. She embraces how there is beauty within pain and expresses the way she experiences life through her artistic practice.

Brazenly visual, Kurt Erickson’s work draws the viewer in through his fresh, vibrant canvases. Growing intuitively out of passing thoughts, emotions and life experiences, Erickson’s artworks grasp aspects of graffiti art, punk rock and grit. His approach to painting integrates a radical embrace of the subconscious mind. Using effortless gestural marks, he allows fluid brushstrokes and the intersection between the intentional and the subliminal to guide his process. Consciously integrating bright and dynamic colors, his works elicit the sensation of free-spirited spontaneity.

With a background in digital art, Erickson uses the time between paintings to create and design within a more rigid environment. He aims to intricately weave together the industrial, the found, and the ephemeral, starting with a candidly organic method within the works he calls “digital collages”. His pieces often start on the computer with layers of textures, photos, found texts, and graphics that are then combined in Adobe Photoshop to be used as inspiration for the canvas.

Erickson’s paintings encourage one to pause and let the mind wonder. He seeks to make visual art that invites the viewer to consider a new perspective and a more thoughtful way of looking at life.

Rowan Eriksson is a contemporary painter with an intersectional practice informed by their gender identity and auditory disorder. Their art explores how the current political landscape in America—characterized by a surge in attacks targeting queer and women’s bodies—influences our vision of ourselves and our own bodies. There has been a growing call in our society to define the body within the binary terms. Eriksson’s own body finds itself under constant scrutiny, its performance of gender continually assessed and tested. This continuous scrutiny has affected their painting’s imagery. Now there exists within them a shifting mass of bodies, asking the viewer questions about perceived identity.

Eriksson received their BFA in painting from the University of Florida and graduated from the Sequential Artists Workshop year-long program.

At age 5, Saundra experienced an epiphany that opened her heart to aesthetics and wonder. She luxuriated in the forms and colors of Hanna-Barbera and still appreciates the influence Modernism had on the artists who invented The Jetsons and The Flintstones. A few years later, she remembers being awestruck by a painting of Caravaggio’s found inside a family bible. She eventually began to fall in love with Art History – particularly Impressionism and Expressionism – and in this way, art would become a portal to true freedom and joy in her life.

Saundra began formal art studies in 1989 at the University of Texas in Austin where she had two mentors, Peter Saul and Carolee Schneeman. From 1990 – 1992, Saundra worked on her MFA at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Following her father’s suicide, she began painting in a kind of desperation to find meaning behind events in the world. She found the greatest process available that would help her overcome darkness and Nihilism – painting in the face of fear and the unknown.

Recently, in a project undertaken by the Columbia City/Hillman City Arts District, she was awarded a prize for her piece, Ontological Surgeon. In 2021 the Artsfund in Seattle chose one of her pieces for the King County Health and Wellness online sociological study, and the year before was also a participant in Saatchi’s The Other Art Fair in Dallas, Texas. The evolution of her work continues today in Seattle, Washington. 

Shruti Ghatak is an Indian-born Seattle-based artist working in different drawing and painting mediums. Her works are inspired by everyday life experiences, conversations and personal memories. Displacement, belongings, and identity take center stage in her work as she explores the genres of figurative landscape, still life, and portraiture. Change of place has always been a source of inspiration to her—memories of old places and dreams of the new mingling amongst the chaos of the present.

Ghatak received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from New York Studio School, NY, USA and an MS in Color technology from Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai, India. She has an interdisciplinary background and studied both Science and Art with the belief that crossing boundaries often opens up new ways of seeing.

She considers her works as journal pages or an autobiography where people, places, objects, memory, and imagination collide with no particular order or rule, celebrating the union of observation, invention, and memory. “All immigrants live in multiple landscapes.”

An Eritrean native, Nahom left his home country at the age of twelve. His artworks explore emotional and spiritual experiences as well as connections through colors and brush strokes. He has always been fascinated with how we are able to convey countless emotions through facial expressions and body gestures. Nahom wonders about the untold stories and experiences behind every face he gets to interact with. He strives to capture that through his brush strokes, charcoal marks, and color pallet choices. He puts a lot of emphasis in his color choice and uses it to communicate feelings and evoke emotions that cannot be put into words.

Nahom’s long journey to Seattle included four years in Sudan as a refugee and about a year traveling through South and Central America to join his mother who left Eritrea when he was a baby. Experiencing life in different parts of the world has expanded his artistic perspective. Art is not just a means of self-expression for Nahom; it emotionally connects him to the community at large. In 2022, he was one of 12 from 88 artists selected by the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture to participate in the Public Art Bootcamp.

In the creation of Nahom’s work, he uses different mediums which include oil, acrylic, pastel, and charcoal. He loves creating art that evokes a sense of social awareness for the community. Nature, listening to people’s stories, people watching, and music are his main sources of inspiration. Through his art, he wants to inspire people to look more deeply at the things around them, things that form this beautiful and complex life.

David A. Haughton was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1956 and moved to Canada in 1991. He has been exhibiting for over thirty years. Haughton has extensively painted the wild west coast of British Columbia with its stormy clouds, turbulent waters and ships at sea. Other recent series explore the power of media photos of “bad guys” to provoke our fears, and reflect on the way these images trigger our innate survival skills. Haughton has exhibited in Zurich, Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle and Vancouver, and his work hangs in private and corporate collections worldwide.

Bonnie Hopper’s work tends to be tactile. She’s always been drawn to the idea of creating art that people can experience through touch as well as sight. Her subjects are a series of observations pulled from the onrush of the everyday life. For example, a visual snapshot of something completely mundane will strike a chord and lead her on a journey. If Bonnie’s blessed, at the end of that journey there will be an extraordinary work of art.

Since she seldom knows what a piece will look like until it’s finished, Bonnie can only plan so far and that’s part of the excitement. For her, painting is about pleasure, mystery and sensuality – a safe port of call for her Muse to land and shed its inhibitions on the way to fulfillment and self-discovery.

Nena Howell, an emerging artist working in Eastern Washington, creates contemporary figurative oil paintings that combine her Tlingit Indian and Ukrainian roots. She brings movement to every canvas and is guided by a reverence for her Tlingit formline and ancestral rhythms that enliven her brushes and oils with a sense of abundance, wellness and stewardship.

After a full career in the worlds of business and marketing, in the winter of 2020 Howell pivoted full-time to art and art wellness. She continually seeks out new opportunities to celebrate and connect to communities struggling with recovery, health leadership and wellness through her art practice.

Howell is represented by Gallery 110, downtown Seattle, and has been selected for awards, grants, and juried exhibitions across the Pacific Northwest. She is a certified Alaska Native Tribal Artist as well as a certified business for the Washington State Office of Minority & Women’s Business Enterprise.

Howell currently works from her studio in Wenatchee, not far from her childhood home in Edmonds, Washington.

Marie Okuma Johnston (she/they) is a mixed media artist who creates in order to unpack her experiences navigating a world where she’s neither quite American or Japanese. She incorporates Japanese imagery into her artwork, tying in her love for Shinto/Buddhist folklore and customs together with modern society. Her artwork is done in bright storybook or cartoonish formats to create a familiar and comfortable feeling for the viewer while challenging them with uncomfortable subject matters around capitalism, modern day events, and systemic injustices. Within each collection, pieces are connected through their layers of storytelling but can vary on how loud or quiet they are to reflect the continuous shifts within our mental states as we navigate a complex and challenging world.

Marie was born in Kitakyushu, Japan and moved to Spokane, Washington at a young age. Three years later, she began spending her summers back in Kitakyushu, Japan. Marie got her B.A. in Cultural Anthropology and minored in Music Performance (Cello) at Western Washington University and got her M.A. in Student Development Administration in Higher Education at Seattle University. She began exploring her artistic interests through her community leadership with the Minidoka Pilgrimage Planning Committee and has since transitioned into her full-time art practice.