CURRENT EXHIBIT • COMMUNITY LIVING ROOM
Freedom of Expression
Art provided by artists from Onyx Fine Arts Collective.
These works challenge any misconceptions of what “Black” art is and is not.
About the Exhibit + Artist’s Statements
In "Freedom of Expression”, the Northwest African American Museum features a variety of rotating talented artists. Black art is often pigeonholed as “ethnic”. This exhibit showcases the strength and range of visual artistic expression produced by artists of African descent residing in the Pacific Northwest.
Angelena McQuarter
Angelena McQuarter is a contemporary artist whose work speaks boldly to the tensions between chaos and calm, beauty and pain, truth and denial. Drawing from lived experience, McQuarter creates pieces that confront racism head-on while weaving in the complexities of life’s struggles and resilience. Her art is unapologetically raw, layered with mystery and emotion, yet grounded in clarity of purpose. Each work is both a personal story and a mirror held up to society. Which challenges viewers to reckon with uncomfortable truths while finding glimpses of stillness within the storm.
McQuarter’s evolving body of work is not just about creating images, but about leaving an impact: sparking dialogue, evoking emotion, and carving space for voices that too often go unheard.
Angelika Grant
My journey as an artist began at seven years old, sitting quietly by my mother’s side, watching her brush move across the canvas. She was my first teacher, my greatest inspiration, and my lifelong creative partner. Over the years, we shared studio spaces, exhibited our work side-by-side, and painted collaborative pieces that merged our individual styles into a singular family voice.
Following her passing years later, stepping back into the studio has been a profound act of honoring her memory. It was her final wish that I continue to share my art with the community.
Working across a diverse range of media—including acrylic, oil, watercolor, metal, and wood, my current practice is a continuation of the creative flame she lit within me. Whether capturing the fiery spirit of a horse or the vivid bloom of flowers surrounding my daughter, my work explores the deep, invisible threads that tie us to family, nature, and lineage. I invite the viewer into a space where love, loss, and legacy coexist on the canvas.
Josiane Faubert
I paint interiors as emotional landscapes. My work explores memory, belonging, and the ways identity is shaped through the spaces we inhabit. Drawing from my experiences between Gabon, France, and the United States, I am interested in how migration transforms our understanding of home, not simply as a place, but as a feeling carried across time, distance, and generations. The women in my paintings often exist in moments of quiet reflection. They are partially revealed, suspended between presence and absence, familiarity and longing. Through intimate interiors and portraiture, I explore themes of care, inheritance, self-construction, and the emotional complexity of living between worlds. Working in oil, I use color, light, and domestic space to create scenes that feel both personal and universal. Rooms become vessels for memory; objects become traces of lived experience. Rather than depicting dramatic events, I focus on the quieter moments that shape a life—the pauses, rituals, and acts of attention through which we come to understand ourselves and one another. Through these paintings, I invite viewers to consider their own relationships to home, memory, and belonging, and to reflect on the stories that live within the spaces we carry with us.
Sydney Noland
I started cutting stars out of paper with an X-Acto knife, feeling lost and unsure of where my life was headed. One became twenty. Star confetti. I didn’t know then what they meant, only that making them felt necessary.
When I’m creating, it feels like I’m in conversation with something that is both within and outside of me. It’s persistent, but loving. he process involves more questions than answers, but before I know it, I understand what I was doing all along.
Experiences of loneliness and emptiness inspire the recurring use of star forms in my work. They first appeared when I felt disconnected and needed guidance. They haven’t left. They continue to evolve, almost insisting on being seen.
When I look at my own paintings, sometimes I cry. There is a feeling of love, care, and freedom in them. A reminder that it is beautiful and strange to simply be alive. That we are held.
Thank you!
Di Faria
As an African-American glass artist, I draw deeply from my life experiences, blending creativity, emotion, and artistry into glass and metal. My goal is to create work that is not only unique and beautiful, but also art that speaks from within. I aim to create something that feels fresh, meaningful, and beautiful—something that speaks from my spirit to yours.
I find deep satisfaction in the entire process, from concept to execution. I’m especially inspired by the challenge of translating the textures and essence of other media—fabrics, acrylics, watercolors, woven art—into the language of glass. I have experienced a range of media in my journey to create, but have found that fused glass is what resonates the most with me. If my work speaks to you, I’m honored.
Junion Mitchell
My work was born our of loss, silence, and the need to survive with my spirit still intact.
I did not come to painting through comfort. I began painting after losing almost everything — stability, certainty, and the version of life I thought I thought I was building. When there was very little left around me, creativity became the one thing I could still claim. It became a place where grief, pressure, hope, anger, faith, and imagination could all exist without needing permission.
Many of my pieces were created inside my vehicle. That vehicle became more than transportation. It became my studio, my shelter, my quiet room, and at times, the only place where I could find enough silence to hear myself think. In that small space, surrounded by uncertainty, I found peace through color. I found prayer through movement. I found meditation through the act of creating.
As the owner and founder of CAM — Creative Art Meditation, my work is deeply connected to the belief that art can become a form of restoration. CAM was created from the same truth that shaped my paintings: sometimes healing does not begin in perfect conditions. Sometimes it begins wherever you can find a moment of stillness. For me, that place was often behind a steering wheel, with paint, canvas, and the determination to turn pain into something alive.
My portraits and mixed media works explore identity, resilience, emotional survival, and the internal conversations people carry but rarely speak aloud. I use layered color, expressive brushwork, bold contrast, and textured surfaces to reflect the complexity of being human. The faces in my work are not only portraits; they are witnesses. They hold memory, exhaustion, dignity, strength, and transformation.
I am drawn to the tension between beauty and struggle. I want me work to show that hardship does not erase creativity. It can sharpen it. It can deepen it. It can force a person to create from a place more honest than comfort ever could. My paintings carry the energy of someone rebuilding inn real time — not after the storm is over, but while still inside it.
Creating art had become my way of reclaiming space. It is how I process what was lost and honor what remains. It is also how I invite others and images that remind people that peace can be found in unexpected places that silence become sacred, and that creation can be an act of survival.
Nova Thomas
My name is Nova Thomas, and I am 17 years old. I am a junior at Timberline High School. I've been creating art since I was 12. I have always been so fascinated by all types of art including theater and singing. I am in chamber choir at my school and one thing my director always tells my peers and I to do is paint pictures in our head about the pieces. We spend extra time learning the meaning of a song before we even start singing it. I apply the same thing to my pieces. I take what I'm feeling in the moment, paint a picture in my head and put it on a canvas with strong intention. I'm always left with a painting that strongly resonates with who I am as a person. Having the privilege to create art in many ways is so special to me. Art gives me an outlet to express things that can't always be said, and l will forever be grateful for that.