- Fire! Fire! Robots!: The Crucible's Fire Arts Festival
- Published: Jul 14, 2009
The festival's centerpiece this year will be the Rootabaga Opera. Based on poet Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories for children, this multidisciplinary piece by Dan Cantrell shows off the Crucible's wild creativity and collaborative ethic at its most grounded.
- Same People, New Context: The African Presence in Mexico
- Published: Jul 07, 2009
By turns a historical exhibition, an art show, and a political treatise, The African Presence in Mexico displays no embarrassment at its own inconsistency. It makes sense: this is a history and a culture most viewers do not know at all.
- Fukú Adaptationus: Campo Santo Acts Out Oscar Wao
- Published: May 29, 2009
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao knew what it was about, what story it was trying to tell, and how it was trying to tell it; its adaptation, Fukú Americanus can make no such claims.
- Present Tense Biennial: Chinese Character
- Published: May 05, 2009
Present Tense Biennial: Chinese Character is exciting to me because it is the first acknowledged ethnic arts show I've seen that doesn't just quietly sneak in a racial diversity of artists, but actually declares that tactic as its raison d'etre.
- Invisible Cities: Houses Shine Like Teeth
- Published: Apr 27, 2009
Although the accusation "sophomore slump" is often unfair, and never truly describes what's happening in a less energetic second album, it does point to a curiously consistent phenomenon. I'm hesitant to apply it to the Invisible Cities' second album, Houses Shine Like Teeth, but if I do, maybe it'll help illuminate some of the dynamics in this messy, charged, and puzzling collection.
- Intelligent Design: [Print] Run at 21 Grand and Others
- Published: Apr 13, 2009
When we accept evolution, our relationship with animals and the natural world is complex: we identify ourselves with them and anthropomorphize them.
- Philippine Sex and American Death: Joël Tan's Type O Negative
- Published: Mar 17, 2009
Type O Negative, throws away as much of the chat and meter and matter of poetry as the poet can get away with, digging toward the vein of fire that, whatever its source, animates both poetry and memory.
- An Ongoing Conversation: The Art of Living Black
- Published: Feb 17, 2009
I suppose you could say that this -- as much as anything -- is what The Art of Living Black is about: representing in art a complex consciousness.
- Not Your Mother's Living Room: Tell It On Tuesday
- Published: Jan 06, 2009
A monthly performance storytelling night (last Tuesdays) at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts in Berkeley, Tell it on Tuesday is like sitting down after dinner in a very talented family's living room.
- InterBay 2008: My Best-Ofs, Online Plus Off
- Published: Dec 28, 2008
Living in the Bay Area we don't ACTUALLY have more access to the world wide whack, but it usually feels like we do.
- Model Sorority: On Immigration, Comics, and Nurses
- Published: Dec 06, 2008
Jenifer Wofford's first solo Market Street Kiosk series is a story in traditional comic book panels. But Flor de Manila y San Francisco is more than just the emo tale of San Francisco days and nights you might expect from our local graphic storytellers.
- Megan Wilson: Home: 1996-2008
- Published: Nov 11, 2008
The installation is Wilson's home; her apartment since 1996. Since 2004, Wilson has been turning her space into an art installation -- one never finished and therefore never made public.
- Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970
- Published: Nov 06, 2008
As befits a show taking place in a city whose population is one-third Asian, Shifting Currents is a jewel in a perfect setting.
- MG Gallery and Sentence Drawing Sentence
- Published: Nov 02, 2008
The Bay Area arts scene has a couple things going for it: 1) we won't admit we're provincial, and 2) individuals continually?contiguously waste non-existent resources on unsustainable and short-lived private arts infrastructure.
- Goh Nakamura: Ulysses
- Published: Oct 03, 2008
Goh Nakamura's first album Daylight Savings, while strictly pleasurable, was most notable for convincing San Francisco that our homegrown singer-songwriting could keep up with Zach Braff's hungry playlist.
- Truong Tran: four letter words
- Published: Sep 09, 2008
While books are usually presented as stand alone objects, having a long-term relationship with a contemporary poet or writer -- reading his books as they come out and observing the development of his practice -- can be much more satisfying.
- The Listener
- Published: Aug 21, 2008
Last weekend I watched a futuristic story in which the junk-scavenging relics of humanity -- left behind when humans abandoned trash-heaped Earth centuries before -- encountered the slick, advanced scout sent to see what had become of their homeworld.
- Neo-Benshi: A New Art Form in Three Scenes
- Published: Aug 02, 2008
Neo-Benshi is the practice of producing live alternate voice-overs for movies. Benshi is a Japanese word referring to the oral "interpreter" who performed a live narrative accompaniment to silent movies, in lieu of showing intertitles with dialogue.
- CalliGRAFFitti
- Published: Jul 22, 2008
Imagine for a moment that you were a polyglot -- that you could speak multiple important verbal and visual languages. Signs, symbols, colors, gestures, and images: imagine that you could read the surface of any culture perfectly.
- Marķa: Politics, Death, Sex, Men
- Published: Jun 21, 2008
If you've never been tempted to try out a glory hole, it might not occur to you that an art exhibition would test your virtue.
- Cool Remixed at the Oakland Museum
- Published: May 27, 2008
Did you know that "cool" is a West African philosophical concept from the 15th century? I resisted the idea when I first encountered it at the fabulous Cool Remixed exhibition in Oakland last weekend.
- United States of Asian America
- Published: May 15, 2008
Yes, you Bay Areans, you APA Areans, it's that time of year again: the time when you're forced to remember that one out of four of you is ASIAN ... enough to make an army, enough to crowd you out of your coding job or spot at Cal, enough, perhaps, to finally get us all beyond the yawny immigrant tale and into the meat of the matter.
- Tourette's Without Regrets
- Published: Apr 29, 2008
They don't have a website. They don't have a regular venue. They jerry-rigged this month's show in a dirty, depressing warehouse, and the lights kept going out. I had to wait in line for an hour with a solidly homogeneous collection of twenty-something white hipsters who B-ed YOB.
- Tragedy: A Tragedy
- Published: Apr 05, 2008
The one thing contemporary first world artists have in common is overwhelming self-consciousness. It can be the self-awareness that turns knowingness into illumination, or it can be the stultifying egotism that so completely mines its own personal history that it misses every imaginative byway.
- June In A Box
- Published: Mar 20, 2008
The temptation to make magic out of the Tucson desert is overwhelming for children. So hot it makes you shiver, so dusty and dry it takes a neophyte years to see life there, the saguaro desert is a vast, supernatural garbage dump where things thrown away always come back deformed and blanched out of exposition by the sun.
- Christine Wong Yap: Activist Imagination
- Published: Mar 09, 2008
Having worked in the "community arts" for nearly a decade, I'm familiar with the frustration of "political" and "ethnic" artists. The moneyed, mainstream international arts scene places aesthetics and formal issues far above content. Even if this weren't so, any political or identity content in art makes the work -- and the artist -- automatically suspect.
- Samantha Chanse: Lydia's Funeral Video
- Published: Feb 05, 2008
Chicken or egg? Does pop culture proactively numb us to the horrors to come, or merely reflect changes that are already happening? Take the three (arguably) most popular movies of 2007: the unintended-pregnancy-fests Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress. Through the medium of politically regressive Hollywood flicks, we discover that the range of choice for battered wives, single mothers, and teenagers now spans keeping the kid (joyfully) or (tearfully) playing cornfield for a barren couple.
- Eastside Arts Alliance
- Published: Feb 02, 2008
Saying the diversity of Oakland is dizzying is to re-utter a truism. More than a hundred -- I've even heard more than 150 -- languages are spoken here, in the Star Wars shadow of our container port. Ethnic cultural orgs form like crystal deposits and scintillate from storefronts in every population knot. There's a there here, but the who is harder.
