Marlene Simas Angeja

Marlene Isabel Simas Angeja, a painter, filmmaker, writer, and teacher, with a beloved community in California and roots in the Azores islands, died of heart failure on June 27, 2023 while resting in her sister's home in Lisbon, Portugal. Marlene was on a trip to visit her parents' homeland, traveling with the people she loved most - her children, their partners, and her grandchildren. She was 69.

Marlene was born in Manteca, California on July 27, 1953, just two months after her parents, Rafael and Alzira, left their village on the island of Pico in the Azores archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean. Marlene spent her first years on a dairy farm with her two sisters, Rosa and Helena. Together, the three girls grew up between cultures -- Azorean-Portuguese and American. Marlene remembered playing with dolls, learning English, watching "My Friend Flicka" on TV, and hearing her mother long for her family back in Pico.

In 1962, her family moved to West Sacramento, where, along with her sisters, she played an active role in the local Portuguese community. While at Bishop Manogue High School, she began to explore her interest in art, a passion she would pursue throughout her life. Reflecting on this time, Marlene wrote: "I took an Art and Ideas class, which combined philosophy with art. I watched a teacher demonstrate gesture drawing. I learned about psychology. I learned to swim. I wanted the freedom I saw around me."

While in college, at the age of 19, her family traveled together to the Azores, where, with the eyes of a young woman, she was able to explore her parents' birthplace. She was mesmerized, inspired, and forever changed. "I can't believe I'm on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean headed for Pico," she wrote in a journal in 1973. "I saw the top of the mountain as we flew over it. Now it sits in front of us like an Egyptian pyramid. The ocean is blue. Blue forever. Everything is blue, even the flowers."

Back in California, Marlene moved to the Bay Area, married Steve Angeja, and had two children - Felicia, born in 1978, and Manuel, born in 1983. She was an adoring mom, fascinated by every new stage and challenge - something she would carry on later as "Vó" ("Grandma") to Felicia's two children, Amalia and Otis. She was also beloved by her two sisters and their daughters, Rafaella and Marisa, and always known for her endless creativity, kindness, and generosity.

While Felicia and Manuel were still small, Marlene completed her MFA in painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where she studied with painter Raymond Saunders and filmmaker Lynn Kirby. During this time, she developed a devotion to her art practice, daily spending time alone in her studio where she believed struggle led to authenticity and covered-up marks were essential to creating. Her travels to Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Salvador de Bahia, Amsterdam, and Paris, and the dear friends she made within the Bay Area arts community, also helped her explore who she was as an artist.

Later in life, Marlene divorced and moved to a bungalow home in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland, a house she treasured always. There she painted in her studio, gardened, meditated, welcomed family and friends, and stayed close to Felicia and Manuel, the center of her world. She also taught as a lecturer in painting, drawing, and color at San Jose State University for over 20 years. She found fulfillment in teaching and inspiring her students, many who became longtime friends and continued to look to her for mentorship long after their time in the classroom.

As an artist, she showed her paintings and films in over 50 exhibitions, including in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Sacramento, Los Angeles, New York, and the Azores in Portugal. Her most recent one was a solo show in 2022 at the Et al. gallery in San Francisco's Mission district. The opening event for the show was one of the most joyful of her career, with family, friends, colleagues, students, and admirers there to celebrate her current work - a series of paintings on hand-stitched linen with acrylic and graphite.

In her career and in her personal life, Marlene made choices to be humble about her own accomplishments while finding great joy in celebrating others. She devoted as much time to her own studio practice as she did to learning about other people's perspectives and processes. Relatedly, she was a passionate and curious reader - Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Hubert Dreyfus, Sylvia Plath, Fernando Pessoa. In her spectacular collection of books, she wrote her reactions and questions in the margins, underlining, circling, notating. She jotted down passages in her journals too, to help her think through puzzles. She was, after all, more than a painter. She was a philosopher.

As Marlene wrote in 2022, "It's all synthesis and bareness and doubt and failure, material and process, and time."