Renata Vashon

Renata Vashon paints the rooms where Black Southern California families actually live: the plastic on the good chairs, the china cabinet nobody eats out of, the blinds that stripe the afternoon across a sleeping father. She works large, in oil on linen, from photographs her aunts kept in shoeboxes and from sittings in her subjects' own homes. Born in Long Beach, trained at a community college before an MFA, she paints out of a converted two-car garage two streets from where she grew up.

Sunday Best