Carla Golder

I am an artist living In Oakland, but was born and raised in Ohio. I received a BA in Anthropology from The Ohio State University Bay Area, and a BFA and MFA in Printmaking from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

The focus of my art is the impact of the African Diaspora and how Black women struggle to overcome oppression and become empowered. The African word Sankofa best expresses the guiding force behind my work: which is to retrieve wisdom that has been lost or taken away, in order to reclaim, revive, and reshape it as we move forward to achieve our full potential. I am reaching back and retrieving elements from my past work and reconfiguring them to tell the story of the African Diaspora – of being uprooted and then re-rooted in hostile environments.

I am guided by ancestral voices that, sometimes through dreams, tell me where the divine feminine resides in all living things, I seek to reveal its presence in the petals of a flower and the trunk of a tree. I am telling the African-American story of struggle, healing, and rebirth. The divine feminine is the spiritual inner resource from which African-American women can derived the strength and perseverance for their journey through the African diaspora. An affinity to nature and the elements is essential to our finding the way to a place of refuge. In this phase of my work, I am incorporating the African deities of water, fire, and air in my drawings to express our inner power and connectedness.