This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.
James G. Leventhal, the director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, San José, first saw Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa’s charcoal drawings when he visited the pt.2 Gallery in Oakland about three years ago. When Leventhal learned that the artist had a studio upstairs, he went to meet him.
“James was super appreciative of my work,” Samayoa recalled in a recent interview at his current studio in West Oakland. “He had such nice things to say, and he was so supportive.”
That’s a bit of an understatement. Leventhal, a generally enthusiastic person, practically levitates when talking about Samayoa, 30, whom he compares to Francisco Goya, the famous Spanish painter of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Samayoa’s drawings of dogs and the people he grew up with in Sacramento evoke humanity, he said, in much the way that Goya’s paintings did.
“One of the really remarkable things about Esteban’s practice is he has this almost singular ability to mimic the real world through two-dimensional tools,” Leventhal said. “The way that he captures a dog’s fur, the way he captures the edge of the paw on the floor, it’s so realistic, but it’s a trick. The ability to render the real world using charcoal is utter trickery. But it becomes transcendent if you do it right. I was visiting the other day, and I was like, ‘Dude, you’re as good as Goya. This is unbelievable.’”
Leventhal’s enthusiasm helped Samayoa land at the museum, also known as the ICA, for his first institutional solo exhibition much sooner than expected: Just six months elapsed between an initial studio visit from Zoë Latzer, the show’s curator, and its opening day in late March.
Samayoa decided to pivot away from charcoal toward other horizons for his ICA debut, “Blood Be Water,” which runs through Aug. 24. He worked furiously to create more than 40 new pieces, which include large airbrushed works, small oil pastels and ceramics, a newer medium for him.
The gallery is divided into two parts. One has dark purple walls hung with black-and-white works. The other features walls and a wooden pyramid installation covered in yellow mud. Colored pastel works and paintings on burlap hang on the textured walls, while ceramics line the pyramid.
Samayoa’s exposure to the world of art exhibitions began in 2017 when he moved with a cousin from Sacramento to Oakland, where they cooked in restaurants while Samayoa worked on his art. In 2019, Guillaume Ollivier, the founder of Good Mother Gallery, which was then in Oakland but has since relocated to Los Angeles, saw Samayoa’s work on Instagram and offered him a solo show.
“We hadn’t seen anything like it before, and we kind of look for outliers,” he said.
It wasn’t just Samayoa’s art that impressed Ollivier. The gallerist called the artist sweet, soft-spoken and considerate, and said his visual language made sense.
“I would go to shows sometimes, and I have no idea what they’re talking about; You know, we’re a gallery from Oakland and dudes from Oakland,” Ollivier said. “He was just painting dogs — like, happy dogs, sad dogs, aggressive dogs. And within that imagery, there were people shaking hands, people hugging, people smiling. People dressed a certain way, hanging out with dogs that we see in our community.”
Ollivier gave Samayoa a space in the gallery.
“He jumped right in, being kind of a family member to all of us,” Ollivier said. “Now we always check in on him and make sure that he’s growing the way he wants to grow. If he needs help with anything, we’re always there for him.”
In 2023, Samayoa had a solo show at pt.2 of charcoal works, colorful paintings that delved into his Guatemalan and Mexican heritage and plaster casts of praying hands that explored his recent conversion to Islam. With his charcoals, he told me at the time, he wanted to put people like his friends on gallery walls and emphasize their beauty.
Samayoa again celebrates his community in his current ICA show. Its title riffs on the saying that “blood is thicker than water” and nods to how his friends gave him the closeness and support that his family couldn’t provide.
“I dealt with a lot of turmoil with my mother and father,” he said. “She, unfortunately, struggled with addiction a lot of my life, and my father was just in and out.”
People in the neighborhood took care of him, he said, and he often stayed over at neighbors’ houses for the school year.
“I remember my friend, he had a cool mother and father, and the father would make dinners for them all the time, and they would all sit at the table,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wow, what? This is so much fun for me.’”
Samayoa started making realistic drawings of cars and faces when he was three. He didn’t go to art school but took a drawing class in 2015 at Sacramento City College and found that he loved working with charcoal.
He described the airbrushed paintings of groups of people in the ICA show as dreamlike. Some of the figures are based on his friends; some are historical figures like Malcolm X. He had wanted to push himself to work in the medium, as well as with ceramics and color.
“People would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you’re the charcoal artist, right?’” Samayoa said. “Even though I appreciated that, I just knew that I had more inside of me that I wanted to show.”
The ICA exhibition also presents a documentary about Samayoa directed by Mancy Gant, who met him at a Los Angeles gallery. When Gant, a photographer and director who has worked for Playboy and The Fader, saw on Instagram that Samayoa was looking for someone to make a video, he offered to do it for free.
“He’s just a really warm person, a genuine person,” Gant said. “I felt that in his work, also.”
Gant brought in Tyler McPherron, a cinematographer, as the director of photography. They planned on making a video of maybe 10 minutes. It’s double that. McPherron said Samayoa, who he and Gant call Raheem or Rah, is a magnetic subject.
“Rah talked about the film he wanted to make to give credit to collaborators and his community,” he said. “He’s gone through a lot, and that’s made him an authentic and vulnerable person.”
Samayoa readily displays that vulnerability with his many close friends, said Jereme Mendez, an artist and designer who is among them. Mendez said he views Samayoa as a mentor always ready to share insecurities as well as triumphs.
“It’s not a competitive race,” Mendez said. “We feed off each other. For this show, I feel like I’m on the sidelines with a big sign saying, “Go, Esteban!”
There’s a lot to cheer for. Samayoa is in a group show at the Anthony Gallery in Chicago curated by Lauren Halsey and will do two residencies later in the year, one at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and one at the Macedonia Institute in the Hudson Valley of New York.
“This is the most sure I’ve ever been about a path, even though it’s still scary to take a chance on art,” he said. “I want a 401(k) and big savings and all that, but I’m just proud that I get to wake up and do what I love most.”
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