Local Filipino artist to be featured at Vallejo’s Mare Island Brewery

VALLEJO – Niki Toney, a local Filipino-American artist, will have her work featured in a gallery at the Mare Island Brewing Co. Coal Sheds Brewery on Wednesday night as the brewery debuts the “Pista Pilsner,” a lager that the company traditionally poured only on draft during the Pista Sa Nayon waterfront celebrations. This year, the Pista Pilsner will be shipped all across the Bay Area for the first time, with every can featuring Toney’s work.

The event is a collaboration between Toney, Mare Island Brewing Company, and Vallejo’s Pista Sa Nayon, the city’s largest annual Filipino festival that is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. It will be held at the Mare Island Coal Sheds on June 6. 

“I’m feeling so grateful,” Toney said. “Grateful for the trust for the project and grateful for my community for helping this project come my way. I’m extremely excited to have my work be accessible to many.” 

The brewery reached out to Toney after being impressed with a piece Toney created for a 2020 show that showed a busy Filipino street market in isometric perspective, which is a style that doesn’t feature a horizon and shows all the elements as the same size. Toney said she collaborated with the brewery and the Pista Sa Nayon team to create a similar Manila market scene, but added in elements of Pista Sa Nayon and Easter eggs of Vallejo figures and different cultural garbs from the Philippines. 

For Toney, the collaboration is yet another positive sign that her art, which she does around a day job, can eventually become her primary focus. 

“It’s always been a confidence and timing thing,” Toney said. “I feel like lately the timing has felt right, and the stars have been aligning in a way that’s been pulling me towards being an artist full time in the future.” 

Toney moved to Vallejo six years ago after studying illustration and silk screen printing at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where she graduated in 2011. But long before that, art was always a part of her upbringing in Biñan Laguna in the Philippines. 

“I’ve been doing art since I was born. Basically since I could hold a pencil,” said Toney. She said her parents always knew that art would be an integral part of her life, and she was blessed with a mother who didn’t try to pigeonhole her into pursuing common careers like being a lawyer or nurse. 

“She was very much like, ‘I want you to follow your passions, and I want to help make that happen,’” Toney said. 

It wasn’t always clear to Toney how she would monetize her passions, and regardless, that was never why she was interested in art in the first place. 

“I never even thought about the concept of working [as an artist] until I was in college, and then I went to art school, and I loved it so much,” Toney said. “Then I came out of art school with a really good handle on how to draw and create art, but absolutely no concept of how to turn that into making money.”

Toney’s first gig was shortly after graduating: a 15-foot-tall chalk mural for an Italian chain restaurant on California Street in San Francisco that has since closed down. 

“I’d never actually worked in chalk before, so I was like, ‘I’m just gonna fake it and it’s gonna be totally fine,’” Toney said. “I drew out a whole menu for them in a day. I was like 21 years old.”

The pay was terrible for the scale of the project — around $200 — and it didn’t launch a career for Toney. But she said it taught her the value of her own time, and what her limitations were for scale. “I don’t know that I’m comfortable working as large as that just yet,” she said. 

Feeling a little aimless after art school, she settled into a finance job, which she still holds to this day. 

But eventually she felt that itch to create again. “After a couple of years of stepping away from being an artist, I realized there was this hole in my life because I wasn’t creating stuff,” she said. 

She started illustrating again, which eventually led to freelance gigs like creating comic strips for the comedy content website CollegeHumor. She then took on illustration collaborations with news outlets like Vox Media and the Los Angeles Times, and eventually did work for the U.S. Department of State and the ACLU of Northern California. 

“Building this clientele and portfolio of work over time made me realize I really do like doing this, and I still want this to be a major part of my life,” Toney said. 

During a 2019 trip to Bohol, a province in the Philippines, Toney became inspired to weave her culture into her artwork. 

“We did a boat tour, which was very magical. You’re in the jungle going down a river, and you stop and do tinikling [a Filipino folk dance] with the people and see little houses on the river,” Toney said. “It was one of those moments where I was like, ‘This feels like an illustration.’” 

So she started to draw more scenes of being Filipina and growing up in the Philippines, pulling elements from her own memories. 

“It just clicked when I did that. It was something I could really speak to and that would feel authentic. It’s my experiences, and my mom’s, and my sister’s,” she said. “There’s not one drawing that I have that I haven’t put a little bit of myself into.” 

Some of her work portrays everyday life, while others veer into the political, like a piece that portrays a group of women triumphing over a group of soldiers from Spain, who colonized the Philippines for 333 years. 

One of the works she’ll be showcasing at Mare Island Brewery is called “bayahan mo siya,” which she created for a 2024 show in Sacramento that had a theme of “agimat,” a Filipino term for power or a talisman. “It was an all-women Filipina show,” said Toney. “It was anti-colonistic in nature, asking how do you use your power as a woman, as a Filipino, or as someone just existing in this world, for good?”

“Bayahan mo siya” features a woman in a Filipina dress with poofy shoulders, holding a fan and looking down at the viewer as she stands between dragon fruit trees. 

“The idea is she’s just existing in this space, and she’s beautiful, but just leave her alone,” Toney said. “Because it’s fully within her rights to do so.” 

Toney’s art will only be featured at the brewery on Wednesday night, but she said she plans on making appearances at the Vallejo Art Walk in June. She runs a booth she calls “Send Doodz” – an irreverent play off the internet and dating app culture phrase to “send nudes.” Customers put a coin in a slot, and for $6 Toney spends a few minutes drawing a cute doodle of their face. 

She’s also slowly working on a series of fine art paintings that she said she hopes feels like “the brown girl Renaissance – images of beauty that highlight Filipino and Filipino-American women and positively show our experiences,” Toney said. 

For illustration gigs, Toney can be reached at niki@kneesandkeys.com.

Mare Island Brewing Co. will hold the artist showcase and label unveiling at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, May 20 at the Coal Shed Brewery.