Above the pt.2 gallery space on Oakland’s Webster Street, artists of all mediums work away in private studios. While musicians like Ovrkast and Demahjiae make new sounds, artists like Landon Pointer and Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa prepare art for upcoming shows.
On one side of Samayoa’s studio, big, mural-like canvases layered with black charcoal and white airbrush paint stand as tall as the artist. His first solo show in a year, Ain’t No Dogs In Heaven, opens downstairs at pt.2 on Aug. 5 in three different rooms that represent three distinct chapters of his life: Pops, Esteban Samayoa and Raheem Abdul Raheem.

The show will start with black-and-white imagery from Samayoa’s childhood in Sacramento, the next room will reference the inspiration he found in his Latino culture, and the last space will document his journey to the Islamic faith. It’s an ambitious presentation for the 29-year-old artist, representing months of work and spanning over a dozen paintings and sculptures, many of them large-scale.
Samayoa, who grew up in a Mexican and Guatemalan household, and attended mosque with friends and neighbors, was always drawn to art. His mom told him he was drawing at the age of three — and not the normal stick figures with a sun in the corner of the page. “She was like, ‘You understood the concept of how a figure looks like, how people look, how cars look. And you were drawing that at a young age,’” he says. “That has always stuck with me.”
Imagery from his Sacramento days shows up throughout his work. Dogs are a constant motif; some of his first drawings depicted Slick Wolf from the old Tex Avery cartoons. Like his father and grandfather — who drove classic Cadillacs — the wolf drove nice cars. As he got older, Samayoa saw himself in dogs like the Doberman and rottweiler breeds, which have connotations of being dangerous. With tattoos on his face and hands, people can initially judge him as a threat, but just like the dogs he grew up with, he’s the opposite: a soft-spoken, kind person.