For over 40 years, East Bay Open Studios has provided an excellent opportunity for art lovers, collectors, and just the plain nosy who maybe want to see inside their neighbor's spaces.

This year, more than 200 Bay Area artists are included in its catalogue of self-guided tours that can take you all over the East Bay—Berkeley, Pinole, El Cerrito, Livermore, Oakland, and beyond. Everything kicks off on Friday, June 2, at Oakland's historic 16th Street train station with a party and an exhibition of some 100 artists (the soiree is invite-only, but all you have to do is join EBOS to get on the list).

Artist spaces will be open from 11am to 6pm the following two weekends (June 10-11 and June 17-18), and activities at each venue will be determined by the artist. You might encounter light snacks and wine, demos, live music, and opportunities to chat with painters, collagists, and sculptors one-on-one. To get you started, here are nine artists who caught our fancy.

Love from Narratives (series), Jody Medich

Painter Jody Medich will be showing works from two of her series, "Narratives," which explores feminity via surrealist oil paintings and prints, and "The Stories They Told Me." Medich explains, "These pencil drawings and prints portray, in a similar surrealist fashion, the stories of my maternal Hungarian refugee family and their experiences as part of the underground resistance in WWI, WWII, and Soviet Hungary. My family shared these stories with me as a child to prepare me for future wars or disasters. But because of my age, they left out the most troubling details making it all the more scary in my mind." // Warehouse 416, 416 26th St., Oakland