East Bay Artist To Be Featured In San Francisco's de Young

DUBLIN, CA — Dublin Arts Collective artist Andrea McCoy Harvey will see her work celebrating the strength and beauty of Black women appear in an upcoming exhibit at San Francisco's de Young Museum.

McCoy Harvey's colorful piece features a Black woman sitting tall, shoulders back, Afro bedecked with luminescent flowers and ears adorned with bright hoop earrings. She used oil pastels, soft pastels, acrylic paint and charcoal to complete her work.

McCoy Harvey, who is Black and often seeks to showcase the beauty of the Black woman through her work, said the piece was her first in quarantine. She was coming off the high of Black History Month — where she booked lots of showings and made lots of sales — when public life began to shut down. The calls stopped coming.

McCoy Harvey said she was "stuck in a place where I was just kind of disappointed and sad. The wave was over and I felt like I had to restart again."

When McCoy Harvey dove back into her work, the result was a woman who is a strong mother, sister and friend who can "walk through fire ... no matter what's going on," she said.

"These are people that are in my life, that I see every day," McCoy Harvey said.

She initially set out to create a piece in which the focal point was hair, since Black workers and students have been singled out and subjected to restrictive hairstyle policies.

"I just felt like this is the way my hair grows out of my head, this is just how I am," McCoy Harvey said. "I'm being made to believe that it's not OK."

She wove flowers into her subject's hair to create a "soft and beautiful" effect highlighting the "work of magic" that is Black hair, she said.

McCoy Harvey is an Oakland resident and full-time art teacher. A few years ago she sold her house in Tracy, moved to the city and opened Avant-Garde Art Studio By Andrea to pursue her dreams as an artist, she said.

It was around that time that she got an opportunity to show her work inside a Bay Area restaurant and stopped by The Frame Company & Art Gallery in Dublin. There she met owner Sawsan Wolski, who began to mentor her and welcomed her into the Dublin Arts Collective.

When McCoy Harvey got word that her piece would be among 1,000 selected out of 11,518 entries from 6,191 artists to appear in the de Young Open exhibition, Wolski cried tears of joy for her mentee.

McCoy Harvey said she's unsure of whether her work will be displayed online only or hung in the museum, but she has her fingers crossed that she'll be able to see it in person.

"To have it hanging in there and walk in knowing my work is in there would be amazing," she said.

View more of McCoy Harvey's work here and keep tabs on the de Young Open exhibition here.