Location: Brisbane, CA
Medium: Sculpture, installation, works on paper
Website: kategoka.com
Kate Goka was born in 1971 in St. Louis, Missouri, and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for most of her life; she is now based in Brisbane, California. Before establishing a full-time studio practice, she spent decades working in education as a classroom teacher, small-school founder — she was a founding member of San Francisco’s June Jordan School for Equity — administrator, new-teacher coach, and homeschool parent. Alongside her education career, Goka developed a parallel practice as a writer: in 2015 and 2016 she was selected as a fellow for the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Emerging Writers Retreat for LGBTQ voices and as a VONA/Voices fellow, developing young-adult fiction and graphic novels, including a project titled The Infinity of You.
In recent years Goka has redirected her creative energy toward a visual art practice built around hand papermaking, sculpture, and installation. In 2025 she was selected for ARTogether’s Artist Mentorship Hub & Residency program, an Oakland-based nonprofit supporting immigrant, refugee, and otherwise marginalized artists. Through the program she opened her studio to the public during the East Bay Open Art Studios weekends and exhibited in the group show over/exposed at ARTogether’s Oakland gallery.
Goka’s work begins with experimentation: she makes her own paper by hand, then builds compositions through repeated layering of drawing, painting, collage, folding, and burning. Fire and soot are recurring tools rather than accidents — she has described her process as “collaborating with fire,” using scorched and singed surfaces to hold space for loss and continuity in the wake of California’s wildfires and the broader pressures of a warming climate. The resulting objects move between abstraction and representation, and between two and three dimensions, as works on paper give way to cast-paper sculpture and room-scale installation.
Craft lineages — papermaking, origami, paper snowflakes, and other everyday folk traditions — run underneath the fine-art surface of the work. Goka treats those inherited techniques and found materials (denim scraps, kenaf fiber, salvaged charcoal) as carriers of history, working from the premise that materiality itself accumulates meaning from the objects and lives that pass through it.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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