When the artists of Richmond need something done, they do it themselves.
The most visible manifestation of this DIY spirit takes place this weekend with the third annual Richmond Open Studios, the flagship program produced by the all-volunteer organization Visual Artists of Richmond.
After launching in 2023 with seven artists opening up their work spaces, “We went to 48 our second year, and now we’ve got 90 artists participating — and that’s not even close to all of us in the city,” said VAR co-founder Erin McCluskey Wheeler, a collage artist who repurposes discarded materials to create abstract, vividly colored works that often evoke the Bay Area’s natural settings.
Event details:
What: Richmond Open Studios 2025
When: Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 6–7 | 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Where: Artist studios and four partner venues across Richmond
Cost: Free and open to the public
Running Sept. 6-7, the event centers on individual studios and several partner sites, including NIAD Art Center, Richmond Museum of History & Culture, Point Richmond Gallery, and four collective studios with multiple artists, such as Firehouse Art Collective in Brickyard Cove. In a sign of Richmond Open Studios’ growing footprint, Kaiser Permanente joined Seaport Studios and ClayPeople ceramic supplies as a sponsor.
Richmond’s manageable size makes it entirely possible to explore a large swath of the work on display in the course of a day. A concentration of studios in central Richmond means “you can walk to a bunch of studios in a few blocks,” Wheeler said. “Last year I made it to every site, and nothing was more than seven minutes away.”
A preview of work by more than 80 participating artists has been on display at the Richmond Art Center since July in the exhibition “Made In Richmond,” which closes Sept. 6.
VAR is filling a void for Richmond artists
Richmond Open Studios offers a hyperlocal alternative to East Bay Open Studios (Dec. 6-7 and Dec. 13-14), an event that has long included Richmond artists.
“But we’re a little farther away from Berkeley and Oakland and have tended to get less foot traffic,” said Wheeler, a Richmond native who lives in the house where she grew up. “We’ve had Richmond artists who participated and got four visitors in the course of a day.”
Richmond’s visual arts scene might be overshadowed, but VAR is starting to change that dynamic. The organization’s events are serving as a magnet for more recent arrivals, such as Sadiqeh Agah. Her identity as an artist has fully blossomed since moving to the city from Oakland in the fall of 2020, a disorienting time to come to a new, largely unfamiliar neighborhood.
“We didn’t know anybody, and everybody was still hunkered down in their home,” Agah said. “I didn’t even know Richmond had an arts scene, and I didn’t know I was going to be having such an art-filled life.”
With the Richmond Art Center about a 12-minute walk from her home in Belding Woods, she started meeting some leading local artists. At the 60th annual Holiday Arts Festival in 2022, she ended up buying a piece from Rebeca Garcia-Gonzalez, another VAR co-founder, who encouraged her to chat with other artists at a nearby table. Among the people she met was Lauren Ari, a longtime Richmond artist who played an early leadership role in VAR.
“Who are these people who live here and are my neighbors?” Agah remembered thinking. “During our conversation, Lauren said, ‘Come to my house. Let’s talk. Let’s make some art.’ It was amazing. That’s what I want, to be close enough with people where we get to be in each other’s homes. I see that in Richmond — community is very valued.”
The desire to nurture that community is what motivated Wheeler, Garcia-Gonzalez and Brian Conery to start VAR. In 2022, the two women sat together at a listening session convened by Los Angeles consultants hired by the city of Richmond to find out what local artists wanted.
“Taking it all in, I realized there was nobody there from the city,” she recalled. “Just consultants from L.A. We were so frustrated by how little action was going to come out of this report. There’s a lot of creative talent and energy coming out of Richmond.”
They founded VAR to fill a void left by city and county inaction, she said. “When developers were building a new building and wanted an artist to do a mural, they had nowhere to go to find them,” Wheeler said. “We put in our own money and time to build a directory.”
Looking to attract more volunteers like Agah, who brings a tech and project management background to VAR, the organization sees unlimited potential in building a local scene that includes the prolific muralist Richard Salazar, sculptor and veteran film industry designer Sara Pisheh, and Cat Caudillo, “a designer who also makes incredible, beautiful stationary and posters,” Wheeler said. “She’ll be showing with her partner David Dugoncevic, an incredible painter.”
Building on VAR’s welcoming ethos, Richmond Open Studios is a party to which everyone’s invited. The organization has worked to cast as wide a net as possible. If an artist faces technological challenges to creating a directory profile, “we’ll work with them to get it done,” Wheeler said.
“From the beginning we wanted to make it equitable and easy to access,” she continued. “We didn’t form it as an art association. There’s no membership fees. You just have to live or make work in Richmond and create a profile in our directory. If you want to participate, we would love to have you.”
