Manos Morenas Gallery

Manos Morenas Gallery was created with a simple belief: our communities deserve spaces where our artists, stories, creativity, and lived experiences are centered and celebrated.

At the heart of our gallery is a commitment to creating greater visibility, opportunity, and support for local Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, and historically underrepresented visual artists in Oakland and throughout the Bay Area. Our goal is to provide an accessible community space where emerging and established local artists can exhibit their work, develop their practice, connect with new audiences, and receive recognition for their creative contributions.

Oakland and the greater Bay Area have long been home to powerful artistic and cultural movements. Yet many of the artists creating within our communities continue to face barriers to accessing traditional galleries, cultural institutions, collectors, and opportunities that can help sustain their work. We believe the artists living and creating within our communities should have meaningful opportunities to show their work within those same communities.

Manos Morenas Gallery hopes to help bridge that gap.

We envision our walls as a platform for local artists to be seen, supported, celebrated, and connected. Through exhibitions, artist talks, community gatherings, workshops, and cultural programming, we hope to introduce our community to artists they may not otherwise encounter while creating opportunities for artists to build deeper relationships with the people and neighborhoods around them.

For us, art is more than something displayed on a wall. Art is memory, resistance, healing, storytelling, cultural preservation, and imagination. Art allows our communities to document who we are, preserve where we have come from, speak to the realities of the present, and imagine what our future can become.

We are especially interested in supporting work that explores the experiences of African and Indigenous diasporas, cultural identity, spirituality, migration, queerness, ancestry, liberation, community, and the many ways our cultures and traditions continue to evolve.

Manos Morenas Gallery seeks to become more than an exhibition space. We hope to create a home for local creative expression and cultural exchange—a place where artists who have historically been pushed to the margins can instead stand at the center, and where our community can experience art that reflects the richness and complexity of the people around them.

We want people to walk into Manos Morenas Gallery and not only encounter beautiful, challenging, and meaningful artwork, but also see the creativity of their neighbors, their cultures, their histories, and themselves reflected on the walls.