Anyone who sews knows the painstaking labor of embroidery. In and out, the needle goes, like tracing lines on a map you just want to fill in. The cartography of identity, in all its memories and foggy capturings, is much like the physical act of creation itself.
In her October showcase “Better Dey Come” at Johansson Projects, Nigerian-American artist Nimah Gobir weaves her familial identity with the poignancy of artistic representation: through early life, foundational faces and those slowly stitched days where we become ourselves.
Throughout this sunlit Oakland gallery, Gobir employs techniques in her oil paintings that show her care for every aspect of her family members and upbringing. Shirt patterns and wallpapers are rendered as large fabric cutouts with repetitive needlework at the edges.
Absent of visual replications of hem or thread, Gobir shows her impression of these moments in “Three Uncles” (2025): Her beer-holding male relatives relax on chairs in the backyard, with brand labels missing, foreign as the metal-canned drink would be to a child. Their bright, patterned shirts are forged in cloth.
The border between picture frames and the flower-printed wall above in “Auntie” (2025) is rich with the same threaded handiwork. The ends of a blue blanket over a resting teenage body in “Tilt” (2025) are textured pink thread, matching the room and this soft source of comfort. Where cloth meets skin — or memory meets vibrant pattern — Gobir is sure to make her hands’ presence clear: Every exit beneath the now-stretched canvas is pulled taut with care.
Throughout the gallery, Gobir’s sculptural work anchors the collection in a physicality that represents childhood, craft and the experience of becoming a young Black woman in America. Gobir paints small flowers on “Pick” (2025), a piece made from four repurposed countertops transformed with house paint into colorful renderings of Afro picks.
“Mother Spool” (2025), a larger-than-life spool of thread, boasts a four-foot wooden needle between its fibers, tying her process of craft to a symbol of connectivity throughout family life.
In “Wash Day” (2025), a young Gobir wears a Thrasher T-shirt while her laptop lies open among hair ties, clips and combs. The events of young womanhood, including the process of caring for Black hair, are mounted in the gallery congruent to her pink-tinted portraits of the tilts and thrills of adolescence. Her only solo portrait in the gallery, Gobir’s eyeline is just out of frame, glancing toward the presumably well-loved family member who saw fit to preserve this moment.
Using references from photographs taken by her father, Gobir renders family members and herself, capturing expressions of intimacy in wide, glowing brushstrokes. Each beloved face has that particular glow of someone captured in a private moment — where the beam on the subject’s cheek is meant not for viewers in the gallery, but the person behind the flashing camera. “No Hurry in Life” (2025) repeats a domestic scene from Gobir’s early life with kitchen floor tiles, brown paper takeout bags and washing dishes, accompanied by her mother’s soft glance down.
Gobir uses a technique of repeated photo transfer to create grainy, film-like renderings of real photos — and real memories and events — on canvas. The living room wallpaper in “Sun Room” (2025) is a repetition of a family scene, with a grid of pictures taken within seconds of each other. Real moments become a backdrop that inspires viewers to piece together memories alongside Gobir’s representations; her hand recreates what her younger self remembers while a cinema in the corner plays the moment back from a photographer’s eye.
In this collection, Gobir’s relationship with process is evidently clear. Each thread retraces the steps of childhood, while her brush strokes construct the faces of family members with gleaming familiarity. Careful reflection on her own youth is painted with clarity, while tender appreciation is shown for those who have shaped it.
“Better Dey Come” will be up at Johansson Projects until Oct. 18.