Celebrating 40 Years of Creativity: The 40 Artists of Midtown

D. Oldham Neath is a cornerstone of the Northern California arts community, bringing over four decades of expertise to her role as the owner and director of Archival Gallery. Since its establishment in 1983, she has curated the gallery into Sacramento's longest-running contemporary art space.

In 1997, Barry Sakata launched b. sakata garo, an art gallery in Midtown Sacramento that deals in contemporary paintings, sculpture, ceramics, drawings, and prints, with art consulting available. Sakata is known for his deep passion for the art world, keeping up with galleries and publications well beyond Sacramento.

Benwar Shepard is a South Sacramento native, music teacher, and member of the Sammie award-winning Element Brass Band. He is the founder of Bigger Than Us (BTU) Arts, an arts education nonprofit focused on supporting positive forms of expression throughout the community through exposure, instruction, and performance in the arts. Shepard's Element Brass Band leads second line parades through Sacramento neighborhoods, and BTU Arts has received city Creative Economy grants to support community arts...

Bryan Valenzuela is a Northern California artist known for a distinctive technique that atomizes the human figure using handwritten text — words ranging from tiny and illegible to large and bold — functioning like crosshatching to create form, shadow, and light, often layered with acrylic paint, gold leaf, gel transfer, and collage. His work has expanded into public art through murals in cities including San Francisco, Chicago, Washington D.C., and New York, as well as a $350,000 sculptural comm...

Cheyenne Randall is a self-taught Sacramento-based artist who has worked in various mediums for over 30 years and was twice rejected from art school. He is largely known for his extensive photoshop tattoo series, "Shoppedtattoos," through which he has pushed the boundaries of traditional tattoo culture and idolatry, and for his colorful mixed media works depicting Indigenous North American leaders. His "Shoppedtattoos" series has drawn the attention of Hollywood's most notable designers and land...

Clemón is a Sacramento-based singer-songwriter known for soulful vocals, expressive guitar work, and emotionally engaging performances. Blending acoustic soul, folk, and contemporary pop, Clemón delivers feel-good, family-friendly sets that connect with audiences of all ages. With extensive experience performing at wineries, lounges, festivals, and community events throughout Northern California, Clemón brings professionalism, warmth, and strong crowd engagement to every stage.

Faith J. McKinnie is an independent curator and critic who interrogates power, representation, and visibility in art history, centering artists whose practices exist outside dominant systems of power, and is the founder of both Sites of Vacancy and Black Artist Foundry, a nonprofit supporting Black artists throughout the Sacramento region. She has held leadership roles at the Crocker Art Museum and the Sojourner Truth African Heritage Museum, consulted with the California Governor's office, the ...

Born in Quezon City, Philippines and raised in the Bay Area, Franceska Gámez settled in Sacramento after earning her degree in Fine Arts from Sacramento State University, where she discovered her love for sculpture. Known for her work with M5's Art Hotel, Art Street, and Wide Open Walls, Gamez has left her mark as a muralist from coast to coast. She is co-founder of Sacramento's 1810 Gallery and a member of the Trust Your Struggle Collective, and has existing murals in Sacramento, the Bay Area,...

Gabriel Lopez is a Sacramento-born graffiti and abstract artist who has spent his whole life living and working in the city, learning from local graffiti writers who helped shape Sacramento's art scene. Lopez describes his style as graffiti heavily influenced by abstraction, with a focus on color, movement, and the experiences—both positive and negative—of having truly lived the graffiti lifestyle. In addition to his visual art practice, he is a podcast host and art curator, and highlights other...

Gina Rossi is a certified welder and metal sculptor who has been a fixture of Midtown Sacramento's art scene for over a decade, with an urban studio in the heart of the neighborhood. She is known as the creator of functionally designed, sculptural bike racks popping up across Midtown and downtown Sacramento, crafted from found metals and repurposed materials. A passionate educator, Rossi teaches welding classes and has been a regular participant in Second Saturday, where she has been featured as...

I Street Art Studios, located at 1727 I Street, features 19 resident artists in 4 studios with a large common gallery space. The space is quirky and the atmosphere friendly and welcoming. The Art Studios (as they are known) is the longest continually operating art studio venue in Sacramento, with a deep history of nurturing new and emerging artists and providing space for the established. Prominent Sacramento arts leaders, groups, and artists have found it their home. For more than 40 years it h...

Jaya King is an interdisciplinary artist and muralist based in Sacramento, California, known for creating dramatic texture and movement in her acrylic and encaustic abstract and semi-abstract artworks. She has worked with nonprofits, development agencies, the City of Sacramento, and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), and is a Gloria Burt Sacramento Region Art Fellow and California Arts Council Impact grant recipient. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Triton Mus...

Jazel Muñoz is a queer Chicanx printmaker, zinester, activist, and curator whose practice is grounded in mutual aid, DIY culture, and amplifying marginalized voices. They serve as Gallery Curator at the Warehouse Artist Lofts' WAL Public Market Gallery, have taught visual arts to artists with disabilities since 2017, and collaborate with community spaces like Prism Art Space and various zine fests across Sacramento. Jazel is the 2026 curatorial mentor for the City of Sacramento's Emerging Curato...

Jeremy Stanger is a Sacramento-based painter and muralist whose self-taught craft spans over two decades, rooted in a graffiti background and eight years as a decorative artist in New York City. He creates meticulously planned murals focused on geometric designs, letterforms, and natural materials. His work is widely commissioned throughout the Sacramento region, with projects for clients including Wide Open Walls, Arden Fair, the Sacramento Kings, and the Freeport Water Tower.

Johnny-Michel Knudsen, known as JM Knudsen or "Kanute," is a California-based multifaceted visual artist, muralist, designer, photographer, and curator with an international reach. His public art spans London, Paris, Barcelona, and Ericeira, Portugal, and he has mounted gallery exhibitions in Paris, Barcelona, and Ericeira. Driven by a belief in art's transformative power, Kanute creates work aimed at inspiring others and promoting a positive, possibility-driven mindset.

John Horton is a multidisciplinary artist from Sacramento, California. While most known for his large murals in the SF Bay, Sacramento & LA areas, John creates artwork in the fields of painting, metal sculpture & design. Starting with 2 dimensional realism in his youth and a move to abstraction over the years, John has built a career 25+ years of experimentation within the arts, focusing on the contrary push & pull of technology and humanism.

Owner and art consultant at Groundswell Art, a prominent Northern California gallery and art consulting agency. With over 25 years of experience, he provides art direction and project management, and curates pieces for local developments.

John S. Huerta is an Arizona native and longtime Sacramento resident whose vibrant acrylic paintings depicting Día de los Muertos themes were inspired by the losses of his sister and mother. His colorful works center on Day of the Dead-styled portraits — ranging from celebrities like Audrey Hepburn and Elvis Presley to personal tributes honoring family members — with each piece driven by the eyes of his subjects, which he paints first. A Sacramento artist and muralist, Huerta has exhibited at th...

Born in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, and raised in poverty by immigrant parents, this self-taught artist found his earliest connection to art through skateboard graphics and metal album covers, before years of factory work and restless drifting led him to explore his aesthetic identity. Over nearly 30 years of painting, he has developed a signature style of intricate geometric line patterns — hand-drawn with paint markers and straight edges — layered over aerosol-sprayed celestial nebulae and prism...

Josef Turner is a Sacramento-based multi-disciplinary artist and the founder of Self Designs Art Gallery. Known for his intricate wire sculptures and graphite pencil drawings, he actively supports the local creative community by hosting art shows, open mics, and live music.

Julian Sander is a Sacramento, CA-based multidisciplinary maker and designer professionally known as Julian Sandpaper. Known for his functional art, intricate woodworking, and industrial design, he creates everything from large-scale interior installations to bespoke sculptural furniture and custom eyewear.

Keia Kodama is a multidisciplinary artist, art educator, content creator, and stylist/designer with over 20 years of experience in fashion and creative direction. Her work centers on creative expression, cultural representation, and sneaker culture, blending fine art and design through a deeply informed visual lens. As an Art Educator at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, where she leads programs through their school and family services. Through immersive installations, fashion, and sneakers,...

LabRats is a dynamic quartet of multi-instrumentalists that specializes in many forms of popular American music. A year after the band’s formation, this versatile jazz/hip hop fusion band has gained a name for itself as a stand-alone act in addition to being the preferred companion to numerous vocalists, rappers, and instrumentalists. LabRats, performing all over Sacramento Bay Area, and LA, has their growing fanbase clamoring for more of their psychedelic and hypnotic sounds. In just a year sin...

A distinctive contemporary visual artist based in Sacramento, Fei Fei creates deeply expressive paintings with powerful cross-cultural resonance. Through her dynamic visual language, she forges boundary-blurring figurative works that reflect the universal essence of human nature. She has contributed several large-scale murals to local spaces throughout Sacramento, bringing thoughtful public art to the community. As the founder of A Space In Between and In Between Arts, she has established inclus...

Manuel Fernando Rios is an artist, curator, and professor of fine art at Woodland Community College. He is known for his exploration of themes related to identity, culture, and community, often drawing from his experiences and the legacy of Chicano art. Rios’ work seeks to engage and inspire others through the lens of cultural representation and social advocacy, reflecting a deep commitment to honoring and amplifying diverse voices in the art world. Born in San Jose California, Rios’ family even...

Maren Conrad is a Sacramento-based female muralist and fine artist whose large-scale public works — some exceeding 12,000 square feet — transform dangerous alleys and neglected urban spaces into vibrant community destinations. Her murals, which blend social activism with striking imagery, have appeared across Sacramento at landmarks including the MARRS Building, DOCO, and Ice Blocks, and her work has been featured in the Sacramento Bee, Comstock's Magazine, and on NPR. Driven by a mission to nar...

Melissa is a California based multidisciplinary artist working across photography, 2-D mixed media, and 3-D installation, with a practice rooted in alternative and historical photographic processes alongside neon fabrication — a traditionally male-dominated medium she embraces as a space for female-centered representation. Her 2-D work blurs the line between personal memory and surreal dreamscape, drawing subconsciously from childhood, heritage, flora and fauna, music, and family to create image...

Micah Crandall-Bear is a contemporary painter and Sacramento native whose abstract landscape paintings examine Earth's intrinsic resources and their accelerated transformation through linear layers cascading from atmospheric to subterranean. His canvases are heavily layered acrylic works built through a wet-on-wet technique that creates smooth, expansive color fields, and his style evolved from figurative urban works incorporating text and graffiti elements into his current refined stripe and co...

Arizona raised painter, Rachel Kerns, now resides in Midtown and loves it! She loves helping people tap into their own creativity and creating her own art. Her work currently is heavily desert themed and she really enjoys painting the desert landscape she grew up around!

Raphael Delgado is a Northern California artist widely recognized throughout Sacramento for his dynamic approach to contemporary painting, sculpture, and murals, with additional forays into costume design and performance art through regional dance collaborations. His highly personal imagery spans human and animal forms, abstract designs, and universal symbols, reflecting the rapidly evolving cultural landscape of Sacramento. Based in the heart of the R Street Arts District, his work is held in n...

Founded in 1954, Sacramento Ballet is the region's only professional dance company and a cornerstone of the Capital Region's cultural community, captivating thousands each year through world-class performances, education, and outreach programs. The company welcomes internationally renowned dancers and choreographers to create groundbreaking work in Sacramento, while also representing California's arts scene on national and international stages. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Sacramento Ballet is driv...

With more than 18 years of experience, Samuel Rose is a master of the needle trade and a well-respected staple of the Sacramento fashion industry. As a successful entrepreneur, Samuel has launched and run three fashion companies – Kings Tribe, Bespoke by Samuel Rose, and b:SR Brand. Passing the knowledge of fashion design and entrepreneurship on to the next generation is one of Samuel’s great passions. He currently mentors 10+ apprentices and has partnered with internship programs at The Met Hig...

Sarah Marie Hawkins is a prominent Sacramento-based multimedia artist, photographer, and community advocate. She is recognized for her impactful work bridging art and social equity, including her notable "Faceless No More" installation for sexual assault survivors and co-curating gallery exhibits like those at the Arden Fair mall.

Shaun Burner is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sacramento, California. He creates large scale murals, sculptures from reclaimed wood, and immersive installations. He is co-owner of 1810 Gallery which highlights underrepresented artists. He has been part of Trust Your Struggle (TYS) since 2006, which is a collective of visual artists, educators, and cultural workers dedicated to social justice and community activism through the medium of art. Through this collective, he has traveled across t...

Shonna McDaniels is a prominent Sacramento-based professional artist, muralist, and activist dedicated to uplifting Black women and creating inclusive art. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Sojourner Truth African Heritage Museum, a cultural institution she established in 1996 to celebrate Black history, art, and culture.

Christian Gates, known as The Philharmonik, has been part of Sacramento's music scene since 2016, blending soul, funk, and hip-hop into a sound that is unmistakably his own. He won NPR's 2024 Tiny Desk Contest with his song "What's It All Mean," which was shot in a Sacramento real estate office, catapulting him to national and international recognition. A vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, lyricist, and music producer, he is celebrated in Sacramento for his music, strong work ethic, support of you...

Known as the “ShowGal of NorCal,” Tinsel Tease is an entertainer, designer and personality embodying a glamorous vintage aesthetic without the vintage values. An award-winning costume designer whose credits include HBO Max and Paramount+, Tinsel builds her own dazzling wardrobe by hand, ensuring every performance is a bespoke masterpiece. Tinsel is a fierce champion for LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC artistry, bringing the heartbeat of the resistance to every stage she graces. From the neon heat of the Sin ...

TwoPoint4 Dance Theatre was founded in 2013 by Tony Nguyen, Emilee Mercado, Christine Crooks, and Diego Campos-Martinez with a mission to explore, challenge, and create innovative dance-theater works blending physicality, original text, and theatrical elements. The Sacramento-based contemporary dance company and nonprofit is dedicated to creating innovative, immersive dance-theatre experiences while expanding equitable access to arts education, blending contemporary and modern dance, vertical da...

Uli Smith is a Sacramento-based painter, muralist, and visual designer. Her studio practice explores identity, heritage, and connection to place, while her mural and design work collaborates with clients to create vibrant, color-driven visual experiences.

Yellow Brick Group (YBG) was founded in Sacramento in 2018 by friends Curtis Currier, Damian Lynch, and Shawn Kahan as a creative agency rooted in the city's culture. Best known nationally for their work with Alien Labs, their reach spans far beyond cannabis into brand design, videography, graphic design, event production, and content strategy. The founders see Sacramento's collaborative spirit as central to their identity, with the "yellow brick" name drawn from the city's connection to the Cal...