Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Printmaking, Textile/Fiber Art, Painting, Zine-making
Website: cargocollective.com/oceanmescalanti
Ocean Escalanti (b. 1994) is an Indigenous (Quechan) visual artist and writer based in Oakland, California. Raised in Southern California, she relocated to the Bay Area more than a decade ago to pursue her studies, earning a BFA in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016. She has described her move north as the beginning of a deliberate effort to build a personal relationship with the Bay Area’s land, water, and Native people.
Escalanti works as an art facilitator and community programs associate at NIAD Art Center in Richmond, a studio program serving artists with developmental disabilities, and as a monitor at Max’s Garage Press in Berkeley. She has completed an artist residency at In Cahoots in Petaluma, and in 2020 received support from the Ara Jo Memorial Grant for her zine Fire Air. Alongside her studio practice, she has built an extensive public-programming career, leading natural-dye and color-symbolism workshops at BAMPFA, Berkeley Art Lab, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, SF Children & Nature, and, since 2023, through the San Francisco Public Library’s Summer Stride and First Person programs.
Her work has been shown at the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, and she mounted her first solo exhibition, Natural Findings, at the San Francisco gallery In Concert in 2023. She has also been an active participant in the San Francisco Art Book Fair, exhibiting her zines and moderating panel discussions on independent publishing about ecology and the natural world.
Escalanti’s practice moves fluidly between printmaking, quilted textile work, painting, natural dyeing, and zine-making, often combining several of these within a single piece. Recurring motifs include beachcombed and botanical materials, fabric photograms, hand embroidery, and coastal imagery drawn from the shorelines of the East Bay and the silhouette of Mt. Tamalpais — landscapes she has described as blurring together into a single recurring dreamscape of water and memory.
Her work is grounded in her Quechan heritage, using color symbolism and natural-dye methods as both artistic material and teaching tool. Zines function as a central and diaristic part of her output — ranging from skill-share guides on natural dyeing and Indigenous color symbolism to memorial tributes for cultural figures like David Bowie, Jerry Garcia, and Daniel Johnston — and her broader practice treats bookmaking, printmaking, and textile work as interconnected extensions of the same ongoing narrative about indigeneity, urban living, and human/nature symbiosis.
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