COL is pleased to present Esteban Samayoa: Somethin’ Bout the East on view through July 11th.

 

Through new paintings, collage and sculpture, Samayoa reflects on the lived realities of communities pushed to the eastern edges of cities through displacement and gentrification. Often labeled as marginal or neglected, these neighborhoods reveal something else when lived in and moved through: resilient ecosystems of culture, food, family-run businesses, and tightly woven community life.

 

Inspired by Charles Gaines, Samayoa introduces a new medium in this series, merging his signature airbrush on canvas with collaged lottery scratchers encased in Plexiglass vitrines. In Star Workers and 99¢, viewers are invited into an intimate side of Samayoa’s community. The front facing, vibrant lottery tickets with their shiny, metallic hues represent hope and the promise of a better life while underneath the airbrushed paintings allude to police violence and immigrants seeking work, holding optimism and precarity in the same frame.

 

In Till We Shine Again, Samayoa interrogates the predatory nature of pawn shops commonly found outside of city centers. These spaces survive on the desperation of local residents, who are often forced to sell family heirlooms, jewelry and other intimate possessions in order to survive. A portrait of his aunt and cousin adorned with diamonds collides with Bugs Bunny proudly displaying a gold tooth capturing the oscillation between the fleeting joy of financial relief and the quiet loss embedded in the transaction.

 

My Pain, Mi Ropa continues the exploration of material culture drawing from Samayoa’s memories of buying dollar tank tops at flea markets. American flag imagery is interwoven here questioning the extent of racial and financial progress in the United States. The garments are embedded in soil and burlap, a material choice that hearkens back to Samayoa’s childhood spent working in landscaping alongside his father.

 

In The Truest Eye, Samayoa references Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, a novel centered on beauty, perception, and imposed ideals in which Pecola’s longing for blue eyes becomes a symbol of acceptance. Samayoa’s painting is his interpretation of a sun-bleached beauty salon sign and feels suspended somewhere between memory, erosion and advertisement. Salons function as spaces of care, self-fashioning, and community, while also reflecting beauty standards shaped by commercial imagery. Morrison’s critique of these unrealistic standards (who gets seen as beautiful, who becomes invisible, and how those ideas are absorbed over time) resonates throughout Samayoa’s painting. Here, commercial signage becomes a meditation on visibility, longing, and the traces communities leave behind on the urban landscape.

 

Samayoa also examines the systems that structure belief and desire in Don't Stop Pr(L)aying. Here lottery scratchers are collaged with advertisements for Bible study. The work engages the shared logic of hope and often frustration embedded in both gambling and religion. These found materials point to how such systems are deeply woven into everyday life, both in West Adams, where the work was made during the artist’s residency at Mass MoCA, and in his hometown of Oakland.

 

Drawing from his own experiences of the “East,” Samayoa presents a group of works that vary in structure, material, and form, mirroring the diversity and complexity of these places. Together, these new works consider survival, adaptation, and the beauty that persists outside the center.

Samayoa (b. 1994) is an Oakland-based artist whose practice moves fluidly between charcoal drawing, airbrushed painting, ceramics, and installation. Rooted in memory and community, his work weaves together his personal history, explores his Mexican/Guatemalan heritage, and process-driven experimentation to explore how meaning accumulates through use, labor, and time. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the Bay Area and beyond, with notable presentations at the ICA San Jose; Charlie James Gallery, LA; Andrew Kreps Gallery, NYC; and Good Mother Gallery, LA.