Museum of the African Diaspora taps four Bay Area talents for latest Emerging Artists cohort
After a cancer diagnosis and major surgery, West Oakland artist Tahirah Rasheed’s next step in recovery — and her career — will be on display at the Museum of the African Diaspora later this year. Rasheed is one of four Bay Area artists granted solo exhibitions at MoAD over the next year as part of the museum’s Emerging Artists Program, which offers support and assistance to young and mid-career talents.
Rasheed said being selected for MoAD’s program “is deeply meaningful to me.” Given her health challenges, Rasheed has spent the past year “working with extraordinary focus and care, particularly while navigating recovery.” Rasheed said her practice is rooted in Black feminist thought and in “illuminating the interior and collective lives of Black women.” Rasheed said that returning to neon sculptures over the past year has “been profoundly grounding.” “Working with light — bending the glass, charging it and witnessing its glow — has felt like a physical and spiritual affirmation of endurance,” she said. “In many ways, my work is inseparable from this moment of survival.” Multimedia creators Rasheed, Dorian Reid, Demetri Broxton and Jasmine Ross will comprise the 10th cohort of MoAD’s Emerging Artists Program. Launched in 2015, the initiative provides recipients with a $10,000 honorarium, mentorship and guidance from the museum’s curatorial and exhibitions teams, and access to developmental workshops led by artists, gallerists, scholars and other experts. Awardees will present their own three-month exhibitions at the museum, while also receiving support for how to create captions, labels and marketing materials for their shows. The work presented throughout the program’s upcoming 2026-27 season will showcase how African cultural heritage continues influencing Black artists throughout the region, according to organizers. MoAD organizers said some of Rasheed’s works, which will be on view from December of this year through March of next year, will be in dialogue with scholars like bell hooks and Audre Lorde. Another of Rasheed’s pieces touches on “The Light We Carry Forward: Overcoming in Uncertain Times,” former First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama’s 2022 memoir. Rasheed said she is “interested in how light operates not only as material but as metaphor — for memory, resilience, care, transformation and continued becoming across the African diaspora.” Throughout the next year, museum visitors can also expect to see ceramic sculptures, prints, photographs and textiles. In a statement, MoAD Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs Key Jo Lee said the range of displayed mediums “demonstrates the breadth of Black artist life,” as well as the “vast perspectives” the artistic program helps to sustain with each cohort. Ex // Top Stories SF residents’ new book delves into Golden Gate Park The 210-page"Discovering Golden Gate Park: A Local's Guide" covers the natural attraction's history and beauty Becerra promises California will ‘not go backwards’ Former AG turned governor candidate sells vision for state SF opens endorsement season with state Dems’ convention California Democratic Party delegates descend on Moscone Center this weekend to try to decide who to endorse for governor down to the Board of Equalization This year’s four recipients all have “a deep reverence for ancestral legacies, Black futurity and the interplay of personal and collective histories,” she said. Reid, another cohort member, said her works observe her personal family history, which includes ties to the Black Panther Party and her relatives settling down in the East Bay. Reid’s mother, Betty Reid Soskin, is another source of Reid’s inspiration. Soskin, the oldest U.S. park ranger when she retired at the age of 100 in 2022 and a historian, died in December. Reid’s MoAD exhibition will run from this fall to the winter. It will include hand-stitched flags, painted protest signs, printed ephemera and sculptures — all of which Reid said touch on her current fights for civil rights and animal welfare. “I never got this honor before in my life,” Reid said of her selection to MoAD’s program. “This thing is my own road to honor my own pathway.” Reid, who has been a member of the NIAD Art Center in Richmond since 2003, said she is excited to come to The City and share parts of her past. Doing so will allow visitors to “know where I’m coming from” and give Reid the opportunity to make “my own work while following my mom’s footsteps.” “With my life, I’ve been African American,” Reid said. “I’ve been trying to create my own history with the African American culture.” MoAD CEO and Executive Director Monetta White said in a statement that each recipient’s upcoming exhibition will “shine a spotlight on their distinct voices.” Since its inception over 10 years ago, White said the Emerging Artists Program has celebrated “the next generation of artistic talent” in the Bay Area, while also “nourishing the cultural significance of the African diaspora.” Rasheed said she was drawn to MoAD because the museum’s commitment to showing works spanning different historical periods, geographical settings and mediums has created “a vital platform for artists who are thinking expansively about representation and belonging.” “To be supported by an institution that so intentionally nurtures these conversations is both an honor and a responsibility I hold with deep gratitude,” Rasheed said.
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