Editor’s Note
When we asked Tosha Stimage who she wanted to have write a piece on her, she emphatically chose bloodstone to write this piece–as an offering. So, he did with the reverence and care that she knew he would. Bloodstone is an artist, writer, death midwife, and dear friend of Tosha’s. He composed this piece by trusting himself to get to the core of who she was, weaving the spiritual with the grit in a way that defined both their friendship and their creative lives. “You speak in flowers,” she once told him.
Tosha passed away while this project was in progress. After her death, we sat with the question of how to carry her story forward and agreed that the piece should be an honoring just as much as it is an offering of their friendship and care for each other. When bloodstone shared the piece with Tosha, she let him know that she felt it truly represented her. When you read this piece and see some of her floral art, you’ll understand what that means.
We offer it here as she wanted to be known: not through the “information” of her life, but through ancestry, intention, and love. This piece and the audio interviews are shared in celebration of this brilliant artist whom we lost much too soon. Her legacy lives on through her loving family, friends, and the communities she touched through her art and her person.
Based in California’s Bay Area, Tosha Stimage’s work unfolds at the intersection of care, lineage, and survival. Art is not separate from living, and tenderness is practiced as endurance.
There are artists whose work announces itself loudly, and artists whose work arrives quietly and stays. Tosha belongs to the latter group. Her practice does not ask for attention; it offers care. It does not rush toward resolution; it sits inside complexity. And at this moment in her life and work, she names her guiding theme simply and truthfully: mending while expanding.
“I’m practicing how to grow,” she says, “and carefully seal up any unhelpful openings.”
“I make for myself. It’s a way to expand pathways of expression for more difficult feelings,”
That sentence alone could be a manifesto for living in the Bay Area as an artist today, where expansion is demanded, survival is constant, and care often feels like a luxury instead of a necessity. For Tosha, however, care is not ornamental. It is structural. It is how she continues.
Tosha Stimage is an Oakland-based multidisciplinary artist whose work spans installation, textiles, painting, collage, and floral design. Across forms, she builds meaning through composition and material choice. Her installations shape space through color and placement. Her textile works hold pattern like memory. Her floral practice brings that same ethic into living matter, arranging seasonal materials with attention to fragility and change, working with impermanence rather than against it.
Care as a Pathway, Not a Product
Tosha’s work creates pathways, especially for feelings that are difficult to hold alone. Grief, exhaustion, tenderness, love that has nowhere obvious to go. Her practice does not flatten these emotions into palatable forms; it gives them space to breathe.
“I make for myself. It’s a way to expand pathways of expression for more difficult feelings,” she says.
When she speaks, there is no performance in her voice. She answers slowly, sometimes pausing long enough that the silence becomes part of the sentence. Her tone remains steady, even when the subject is tender. Occasionally, a quiet humor surfaces, not to entertain but to remind us that care and gravity can coexist. It feels less like an explanation and more like an offering.
For Stimage, housing precarity has meant creating without the luxury of assuming permanence. It has shaped timelines, access to space, and the way materials are held or released. The work continues, in conversation with the question of where and how to remain.
In recent months, those feelings have been shaped by holding the memory of her younger brother, who died unexpectedly, close in her heart. That holding extends outward as well, to the people who hold her. She describes it as a “mutual embrace,” a circulation of care rather than a one-way offering. Her hope is not to rescue, but to reflect. Not to instruct, but to illuminate.
“I’m hoping my actions and work will be a beacon for wherever people may find themselves in need of light.”
There is nothing abstract about this intention. It is embodied, relational, and deeply human. Tosha’s work does not separate art from living. It understands creation as something that happens inside real conditions—emotional, familial, economic, and spiritual.
The Material Reality of Making
Like many artists in the Bay Area, Stimage is not blind to the material realities that shape her ability to create. Housing precarity looms largest. The rising median cost of living continues to climb, while resources lag behind. For artists, this imbalance is not theoretical. It is felt in the body.
For Stimage, housing precarity has meant creating without the luxury of assuming permanence. It has shaped timelines, access to space, and the way materials are held or released. The work continues, in conversation with the question of where and how to remain.
“Playing catch up and starting from scratch are twin evils,” she says.
The effort required just to meet and sustain basic human needs, especially housing, consumes energy that might otherwise flow into creative work. This constant state of survival is physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausting. It is not a lack of discipline or vision that slows artists down; it is the relentless demand to stay afloat.
And yet, even within these constraints, she names blessing, not as denial, but as recognition. She speaks of a small, special group of people who continue to share their spiritual light with her. The circle is not large, but it is luminous. It is enough to remind her that she is not alone.
It is an ethical stance. Art, in Tosha’s worldview, is not decoration. It is infrastructure. It is one of the ways we remember how to be human.
Lineage, Legacy, and “Living Better”
When she speaks about legacy, Tosha does not reach first for institutions or accolades. She reaches for people—especially women. Her great-grandmother, Thelma Hamilton Walters, comes to mind, alongside countless matriarchs who survived the horrors of the Deep South with grace and a self-determined dignity. Their endurance is not romanticized; it is honored as instruction.
“‘Living better’ is a place. I strive to inhabit that place whenever I awake,” she says.
It is about integrity. It is about how one moves through the world, how one treats others, how one tends to the life they have been given. Her siblings, especially her older sister and two younger brothers, are central to this ethic. They drive her desire to grow, not just as an artist, but as a person.
“I really want to multiply myself,” she says.
Tosha does not plan to have children, and she speaks about this with clarity and peace. Instead, she understands procreation in more abstract and expansive ways. To multiply herself is to multiply love, to take the care she has received and make more of it. Her work becomes a vessel for that continuation.
“I hope that someone always thinks of me,” she says.
Artists as Keepers of Balance
For Tosha, care is not optional. It is urgent.
“If practices of care aren’t normalized and practiced with urgency,” she says, “we can’t hope to have a world—let alone a creative one.”
She places artists—musicians, chefs, poets, makers of all kinds—within a sacred lineage of alchemists. These are people who transform energy and material into something sustaining. Their labor holds balance, even when that balance is fragile. Without this work, she warns, the world risks sliding into unimaginable horror.
This is not hyperbole. It is an ethical stance. Art, in Tosha’s worldview, is not decoration. It is infrastructure. It is one of the ways we remember how to be human.
to create beauty under pressure, to offer care while navigating scarcity, to remember lineage while imagining new futures.
Memory, Compost, and the Afterlife of Love
When asked about collective memory, Tosha answers without grandiosity, but with striking honesty.
“I hope that someone always thinks of me,” she says.
She hopes an image she has created might live on—not necessarily as a monument, but as possibility. She imagines her body composted into a garden, something nourishing or beautiful growing from what remains. This vision is not morbid; it is generous. It places her life within a cycle of care that extends beyond the self.
“I hope I’ll be remembered as someone who tried to love,” she says. “Who forced violence to succumb to intention and understanding.”
In this way, Tosha’s work participates in collective memory not as documentation, but as care. It remembers by tending. It insists that love is not naïve, and that understanding is a form of resistance.
Holding the Line
To be a culture keeper in the Bay Area today is to live inside contradiction: to create beauty under pressure, to offer care while navigating scarcity, to remember lineage while imagining new futures. Tosha Stimage does this work quietly, persistently, and with deep intention.
Her practice does not promise easy answers. It offers something more enduring: a way to mend while expanding, to grow without abandoning oneself, and to hold love as both inheritance and responsibility.
In a world that often rewards speed and spectacle, Tosha reminds us that care, practiced daily, urgently, and with devotion, may be one of the most radical acts we have left.
