“I intentionally center people from my community to convey the weight of labor and invisible hardships in a changing environment through the perspective of hands,” artist Callan Porter-Romero told 48hills.
“I am especially interested in capturing how people in these communities reclaim their right to humanity in their quiet moments,” she continued.
In her hometown of Oakland, Callan Porter-Romero finds her muse. In fact, the city where she was born, raised, and remains deeply rooted is the primary inspiration for her vivid, constructed paintings.
Utilizing recycled materials and paint and incorporating three-dimensional assembled hands to the flat-surface of canvas, her creative work focuses on how people in her community nurture wellbeing. By depicting people interacting with the natural world, Porter-Romero hopes to deliver the intimacy of self-discovery.
She’s curious about the complexities surrounding identity and what it means to thrive despite difficult circumstances. She is hopeful when it comes to Oakland’s future, and fully engaged in witnessing its beauty.
“Sure, there are challenges, but I remain motivated to seek out the fascinating stories that exist here,” she said.
Porter-Romero was always interested in the idea of being an artist, though at times, it seemed like a far-fetched plan. In middle-school, Porter-Romero nutured an early interest in fashion design by working in sketchbooks. Later, she completed a BS in Ecology and Evolutionary Behavior at UCLA (2016). After graduation, she moved to Santa Cruz, initially to work for a strawberry and tomato-growing greenhouse. In the ensuing three-plus years, Porter-Romero worked for a biotechnology company called Two Pore Guys (later known as Ontera), which utilized nano-pore technology for diagnostic testing of specific cancers and plants.
“At work, I would draw during my meetings when I was meant to be discussing an experiment or listening to someone else’s investigative progress,” she confessed.
In late 2019, she returned to Oakland to begin work with a food science company as their product developer. But a couple of months prior, she decided to paint a mural on the side of her parents’ house. It was based on one of her sketches. She thoroughly enjoyed the process of creating the mural and was encouraged by the neighbors’ kind response. But it wasn’t until the isolation of the onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020 that she found enough time away from the lab to really focus on painting.
The seeds were planted long before that—Porter-Romero’s heritage is an important touchstone of her work. Her mother is from Oakland, of Black and Japanese ethnicity and her father is from Mexico.
“My mother’s family came from Tulsa, Oklahoma and were one of the Freedmen—previously enslaved Black people who were a part of the Creek Nation, a heavily debated and politically complex identity. Her Japanese side, originally from Fukuoka, was interned during the 1940s Second World War. My dad’s family has less documentation regarding family history, but he grew up in Mexicali near the border and my grandfather is part Yaqui,” she said.
Her connection to place is also integral to her work. Growing up in Oakland, one experiences things that are difficult to convey to those who didn’t. In early works, Porter-Romero’s focus on her immediate neighborhood and family background are evident. Her painting from late 2020, Reclaiming the Resurrection of Us, depicts a person laying flowers on a street corner altar, an act of honoring people who have passed away, an ever-present visual in her neighborhood.
“I felt inspired to share stories of historical injustice first as it related to my own heritage,” she said.
She views the Bay Area art community as being deeply entrenched in the concept of world building, human connection, and growth. While there is a more established industry here, there is also a major grassroots network that focuses on nurturing local emerging artists regardless of medium.
“There are so many people who care about sharing opportunities with you rather than gatekeeping them because how we envision the growth and sustainability of the Bay Area art community is aligned,” Porter-Romero said.
The artist works in her childhood home on the edge of East Oakland. One of its rooms—a narrow, windowed sunroom which started as a combination art space and grow-room for peppers and kale—has since been expanded upon. A second, larger room is where she now creates the bulk of her work, handling multiple paintings at once.
“Birds, squirrels, and butterflies visit every day while I paint, due to the tall vegetation in the backyard acting as a hidden oasis. There is a large oak tree outside the window, so I can watch animals there as well,” she said.
A typical day begins with coffee and a review of current paintings, determining the next steps and establishing an agenda. Plugged into music or an audiobook to stay focused, Porter-Romero’s materials dictate the movement of her process.
“With acrylic paints and cardboard on canvas or linen, tasks may include adding gradation or carving into the cardboard hand. A painting is complete when a couple of conditions are met: I no longer obsess over the next steps, I feel excited about the finished product, and feedback is manageable,” she said.
Reflecting back on the social isolation during the pandemic and its lasting effect, the artist said that the period led her to re-evaluate what it means to coexist with a world that is rapidly changing.
“Human touch or engagement bridges that connection. Because of this, many of the characters in my paintings tend to be alone or at least appear that way. There is an intimacy between the hand and the action that the hand is doing,” she said.
She gardened a lot during the pandemic, an eye-opening experience that kept her grounded. It also provided her with a greater appreciation for her grandmother’s thriving garden and all the hard work she put into it. Eventually, such activities began to show up in her artwork, where they continue to appear.
“How someone empathizes not only with other people but also with their respective ecosystem is crucial for people to feel grounded and connected to the world,” she said.
Her own connection to nature is verifiable not only through her art but in her passion for gardening, harvesting her own produce, and traveling to national parks, “to climb their respective mountains.” Porter-Romero is now working on a new series that shows people interacting with or blending into nature, both locally, such as at Oakland’s Lake Merritt, or somewhere further afield.
“The new paintings also include people engaging in meditative activities such as flat-ironing one’s hair or laying in the grass. For the past few months, I have combined my exploration of hair with ecology. The painting Palm Tree depicts a hand lying in a field of daisies. The shadow of the flower looks like a palm tree, an exotic and seemingly out-of-place plant that contrasts with the ordinary scene,” she said.
Combining the flat surface of painted canvases with the addition of constructed, three-dimensional hands not only adds depth to the pieces, but also encourages empathy with the characters within the scene. Originally using various recycled materials found at the Reuse Depot on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, Porter-Romero turned to thick, well-made cardboard—a packing material readily available from her lab—when the store closed during the pandemic. It was for her third painting of 2020, It Was a Blue Sky Somewhere Else, that she first created a hand solely out of cardboard. Her work as a flavor chemist may explain why she leans into enhancing both sensory and textural experiences in her paintings.
“Because the hands literally pop out of the canvas, the enhanced texture allows me to play with both flat and three-dimensional perspective,” she said.
Opening on September 20, Porter-Romero will be in the group exhibition, Grow, at the Palo Alto Art Center, which closes on December 15. Recent exhibitions include participation in the Juried Members Exhibition titled Excursions at the Berkeley Art Center, Art of the African Diaspora 2024 at Richmond Art Center from January 24 through March 16, 2024, the group exhibit Art of the African Diaspora: Perspectives from the East Side at the Eastside Arts Alliance in East Oakland; and inclusion in the de Young Open 2023.
Artist Callan Porter-Romero merges her rich personal lineage, roots in local community, affinity for the natural world, and scientific vocation into a single expression of life’s interdependence. She wants to keep going and have fun along the way and encourages us to do the same. She hopes that people will find relatability to the characters and their actions in her paintings while seeing humanity in the materials.
“I also hope that people will think more about their everyday interactions with nature and how it impacts their communities,” she said.
For more information, visit her page on Instagram.
