After spending 12 years as a freelance graphic designer, Wokeface began making art for herself and displaying it on the streets of Portland. Her paintings are beacons of joy in these dark times with her remarkably simple symbol of a serene looking smiley face with a wide open third eye.

Amoako Boafo paints figures of the African Diaspora as "a celebration of Black life." His figures are dense flurries of brushstrokes amidst smoother patterns and monochrome backgrounds.

Jean Nagai's paintings are interference patterns of bright hues that seem to move and vibrate.

Stephanie Pierce makes laboriously observed paintings from her immediate surroundings that feel glitchy, time-lapsed, and transitory.

Kelly Bjork paints domestic interiors-- scenes of tenderness, intimacy, and vulnerability in which she envisions something like utopian cohabitation.

Jeremy Okai Davis makes paintings that adroitly mix elements of abstraction and figuration. The skintones of his figures are alive with spots of intense color that are a testament to optical color mixing.

The simplicity of Linda Stark's paintings belie their meticulous construction. Using tiny brushes, she builds layers of oil paint into graphical images rich with ridged patterns, textures, and sculptural effects.

Ralph Pugay makes paintings that trade in archetypes, uncomfortable humor, and weird space.

Calvin Ross Carl makes paintings that look like thick ropes of paint methodically built into graphically flat images of words or simple icons.

David Leggett makes paintings riffing on the realities of racism in America today.

Throughout her work, Adrienne Elise Tarver has finessed both material and subject matter in ways that matter here and now. She maintains a lush green, tropical color palette and her most recent exhibition addresses the myth of the exotic brown-skinned woman from a tropical paradise.

Kimberly Trowbridge’s paintings strike me as both carefully observed and strangely fantastical. She is a painter versed in Academic tradition and observational painting, and that critical eye is evidenced throughout her wide body of work.