Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Ceramics, Installation
Website: goodmothergallery.com/artists/50-esteban-samayoa/
Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa (b. 1994, Sacramento, CA) is a Mexican-Guatemalan artist based in Oakland, California. Largely self-taught, he moved to Oakland in 2018 to pursue art full-time. His upbringing in Sacramento — marked by a close-knit community of neighbors and extended family who provided structure and guidance — remains a central touchstone in his work. His identity encompasses overlapping cultural inheritances: Mexican and Guatemalan heritage on one side, and a journey toward Islamic faith that added another dimension to his name and practice.
Samayoa received the 2024 Artadia Award for the Bay Area, with jurors including Corinne Erni, Ileana Tejada, Laura Phipps, and Việt Lê, recognizing his growing impact within the regional art community. In 2025, he presented Blood Be Water, his first solo institutional exhibition, at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, featuring over 55 new works. His practice has attracted collaborations with brands including Carhartt WIP, Salomon, and Cadillac, and he has been represented by Good Mother Gallery (Los Angeles), Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles), and Anthony Gallery.
Samayoa works primarily in charcoal drawing and airbrushed painting on canvas, frequently incorporating oil, oil pastel, ceramics, and mixed-media installation. His signature aesthetic is a hauntingly expressive greyscale palette — monochromatic airbrushed and charcoal compositions that carry an ethereal, almost ghostly quality evoking memory, ancestral ties, and shifting identities. Non-traditional surfaces such as burlap, plaster, soil, and Guatemalan coffee sacks ground his images in material and cultural specificity, referencing Guatemala’s coffee industry and his diasporic roots. Influences from muralism, street art, Latin American modernism, and folk traditions run throughout his work.
His imagery draws from deeply personal iconography: lowriders, dogs (particularly Dobermans and Rottweilers as symbols of power and misunderstood identity), tattooed figures, smiling children, Black revolutionaries, and Brown pride. Dogs appear as a recurring motif tracing back to his earliest drawings, inspired by cartoon characters and his father and grandfather’s appreciation for vintage Cadillacs. Samayoa approaches survival itself as a creative act — “all people who survive anything… they’re all artists, because you have to think creatively to get to the next day” — and his work functions as both personal testimony and a bridge for collective experience.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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