At a table set with a locally grown feast — hearty potato, kale and white bean soup, cornbread, fresh butter and mushroom gravy — sits a group of individuals all involved in sustainable farming in the Bay Area. As they discuss strategies in environmental activism, they sit below a makeshift Read More…
Take one look at Deborah Oropallo’s artwork, and you haven’t seen anything. This Bay Area artist’s hybrid prints are so intricate that one’s eye must linger and settle to take it all in, peeling away the layers to extract a narrative. And that narrative is certainly a unique one. In Read More…
Although museums can only show a tiny percentage of their collection at any given time, to hide away your de Kooning, Rothko and Pollock somehow seems criminal. In the Berkeley Art Museum’s exhibit, “Abstract Expressionisms: Paintings and Drawings from the Collection,” the museum brings out some of its most impressive Read More…
Last Saturday morning, the Oak Street Plaza’s giant wall at the entrance of the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) was entirely black. Four artists — Ras Terms, Safety First, Tecka, and Resta — were just arriving on the site to prep the space for the project “Living Concrete.” Paints were Read More…
A garbage facility may sound like a terribly unattractive place to visit — let alone as a subject of artistic scrutiny. Yet this past Friday at a recycling and disposal center, Recology San Francisco, the unique Artist in Residence exhibition turned the notion of waste as useless or ugly on its Read More…
At first, it’s easy to miss the planters at the Actual Cafe in Oakland. On winter nights, warm wooden tables and chairs beckon frozen passers-by. Some leftover Christmas lights dangle by the windows. Bicycles hang suspended on the walls. The chalkboard in the bathroom displays curious bits of graffiti. A Read More…
Oakland street artist Eddie Colla immediately felt compelled to act as he witnessed the Occupy movement unfold. Overwhelmed by outrage over the issues that emerged and by the passion of those participating, he found self-expression inevitable. In late September, Colla created a design that would appear in cities across the Read More…
“The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible,” screams the words of Oakland-based street artist and printmaker Paul Barron from his Art Attack Mural, painted on an otherwise nondescript wall in Rome, Italy. Barron, and others like him, are not only artists, but activists, people whose work are Read More…
Tucked away in the folds of San Francisco’s Inner Richmond, there is a space station of sorts that will transport you into a science fiction world of the future. This past Friday, the recently fire-damaged Fecal Face Dot Gallery opened up a temporary new location for its shows. Inside, they Read More…
In today’s age of point-and-shoot digital photography, it is easy to disregard the art form’s intimate reliance on light. Free from light meters, f-stops, and ISOs, few understand photography as the capture and manipulation of light, it’s fundamental form. “Sun Works,” a photography exhibit that opened at The Berkeley Art Read More…
