Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Ceramics, Textiles
Website: rebeccacamacho.com/artists/99-laura-rokas/
Laura Rokas (born Laura Rokas-Bérubé in 1989 in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Québec) is a painter, ceramicist, and textile artist based in San Francisco. She earned a BFA with Great Distinction in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University in Montréal in 2013, after first studying fine arts at Dawson College. She moved to the Bay Area in 2014 and completed her MFA in Studio Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016, where she received the Anne Bremer Award for Best in Show at the SFAI graduate exhibition, the Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, and the Alan B. Stone Painting Scholarship.
Rokas has since built a steady exhibition history around San Francisco, with solo shows Tears of Rage (2016) and La Course en Tête (2018) at Guerrero Gallery, Super Domestique (2023) and the two-person exhibition Call of the Void (2024) at 1599fdT, and A Meal in Itself (2025) at Rebecca Camacho Presents. Her collaborative work with Taravat Talepasand was selected for the Bay Area Now 8 triennial at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2018, and in 2017 her painting Paint by Number 7 was chosen as one of fifteen finalists in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. She is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant and won the BMO 1st Art! Québec regional prize in 2013.
Her work is held in the Kadist collection as well as the Colart and Battery SF collections. She continues to live and work in San Francisco, where an upcoming solo exhibition, Lucky Number Seven, is scheduled to open at Rebecca Camacho Presents in mid-2026.
Rokas builds a dreamlike, uncanny visual world out of doubles, doppelgangers, and alter egos, remixing personal experience with imagery drawn from pop culture, literature, science fiction, and — especially — competitive cycling. A recurring protagonist with jet-black hair, blood-red dagger nails, and glaring eyes recurs across her paintings, quilts, embroidered patches, and ceramic sculptures, functioning as both a fictional character and a stand-in for the artist herself. She often begins a body of work by constructing rough cardboard sculptures, which she then paints, casts in ceramic, or otherwise “reincarnates” into other mediums, turning a disposable material into something fragile and precious.
Cycling culture runs through much of her practice, from the Tour de France references of La Course en Tête to the master/servant dynamics of Super Domestique, which she uses to examine gendered hierarchies, perfectionism, and submission in art-making and beyond. She learned quilting, weaving, and embroidery by watching her mother and sister work, and treats needlework and ceramics with the same formal rigor as her oil painting, deliberately unsettling any hierarchy between craft and fine art. Her most recent paintings recreate vintage Betty Crocker and Weight Watchers recipe cards in meticulous, near-photorealist oil on paper, mining mid-century domestic imagery for its strangeness and its quiet commentary on gender and labor.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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